- 158 -

country will ever rise again to its former level. Some great ones may be able to get a fine cut out of it, but poor bunglers like us whose wares are all down in price, certainly not.

Meanwhile, however, things still went passably well with me, and if I had been willing to constrain myself to miserliness or merely to anxious thrift, I might at the present day pass for a well-known man of means. But this talent [...] was never allotted to me and will very likely never be so, for as long as I live in this temporal sphere. [...] So soon as I am in company, where people give me fair words or do me a service - or where it is a question of my own pleasure - then I usually act the part of a man who does not need to watch the schillings or the guilders, and has them not just by hundreds, nay, but by the thousand. This happened particularly during the first rapture of my freedom from those gentlemen who were persecuting me. I was like one who has got off scot-free from a prison where he thought to remain for life, or even one reprieved upon the scaffold, who now runs free over hill and dale. I should have stumbled hundreds and hundreds of times, and even perhaps into debauchery and vice - in short have sunk out of sheer joy into even more evil abysses, had not my good angel with drawn sword stood in my way, as once to Balaam's donkey

[Numbers 22, v 23]
."

1st Jan. Bräker decides to allot a single page per month to his diary "to write this and that down in it just as it happens. The reason - my business affairs increase as time goes on - and there would be too much to write even without the fact that I have my autobiography still incomplete since 1781 - I think to complete it in this year - if God sends me health and length of days". As a result of this the diary entries are sparse. At the end of January he records that business is going well, but Jakob has palpitations and he himself had a heavy fall in the street in Lichtensteig. The weather remains very wintry until mid-April. [Chronik, pp 272-273]

9th Mar. Bräker finds that there is a high demand for yarn at Herisau and he has been selling it at too low a price. [Chronik, p 274]

28th Mar. "Such a winter and such an Easter cannot be called to mind even by greybeards of 90 years old." Several entries about this time mention that the Thur had frozen over,

[which appears to have been unusual]
. On April 3rd Bräker observes that fewer birds can be heard singing than in other years. [Chronik, pp 274-275]

14th Apr. Bräker clears snow from his garden, spreads manure and sows seeds. [Chronik, p 275]

15th May Whit Sunday. Bräker has severe toothache. He goes to church in Krinau, but feels little edified by anything except the Communion. Next day, however, he is moved by the words of Johann Michael Sailer, a Catholic theologian. In Swabia the late snow has destroyed the seed, so that the price of corn has gone up. [Chronik, p 276]

[Sailer was a friend of Pastor Lavater, who had recommended some of Sailer's books to his congregation. Bräker might have known this.]

22nd May Bräker travels with his two younger daughters Susanna Barbara and Anna Maria to Herisau, St. Gallen, Rorschach and Rheineck, where they visit Johann Ludwig Ambühl. On the first two days they enjoy good weather, on the third it rains. [Chronik, p 277]

31st May Bräker and Johannes go to Glarus on muddy roads and settle accounts with Zwicky-Stäger, they are kindly welcomed but do not get much cash. Next day they travel in heavy rain to Kaltbrunn via Mollis and Weesen. In July Bräker records that the hay harvest is hampered by bad weather and it is cold enough to need fires in the house. [Chronik, pp 277-278]

28th July "Rumour upon rumour here, in St. Gallen and Herisau, indeed probably in the whole of Switzerland, nothing but perplexity, indecision and confusion on everyone's faces. The cause is: the cotton trade, so profitable till now, has suddenly come to a complete standstill. One Vergenes



Contents