Der Meeresstrom: eine Erzählung für die Jugend

Blind embossed pebbled cloth 16mo, 64pp. With English title "The Gulf stream" below imprint. Contemporary blindstamp of Reading, PA, bookseller Samuel Hechler to ffep. With engraved frontispiece. Very God with light rubbing and spotting to boards, occasional fingersoil to textblock. Contemporary signature to pastedown, S. M. Stutzman. First listed in American Tract Society ads and Annual Report in 1852-1853. A nice surviving example of ATS’ German-language publication, with a peculiar frontispiece showing a George Washington-like figure over the distressed body of an Indigenous man. Printed in Fraktur. 7 in OCLC.

Based on a rough translation—a London widow with two sons struggles with the younger's disobedience. When the well-behaved son dies, she becomes ill and cannot manage the unruly child, who ultimately becomes a criminal and is deported, sells his mother’s Bible for liquor, narrowly survives a shipwreck, and then slowly turns his life around. Originally published in Germany in the 1830s, a rough translation of the first lines of that edition (omitted in the ATS edition) sum it up: "an ocean current plays a very important role, becoming a saving angel that rescued a poor man, near ruin, not only from physical but, what is much more, from spiritual destruction."