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bless your fields, your pastures and your flocks, and restore to you what has been taken from you. And those robbers will sooner or later meet their fate.

9th May How well it is for me when I can tear myself away from all the cares of life and immerse myself in the new life of Nature, flutter like a butterfly from flower to flower, or buzz like a cockchafer from tree to tree, and everywhere breathe in balmy airs. I would like to hop around in the bushes along with the robin and the wren and tune a song of praise with them to the creator of such manifold beauty. I would like to hop around like a warbler in the silken-soft grass, find pasture among flowers of all colours, and trill a song of love to Nature who creates it all. I would like to rise into the sky like the lark, and circle there making the upper regions sound with my song, and full of joy peer down at the many-coloured earth, and gradually let myself descend and take my night's lodging in the rolling sown fields, until the sunrise woke me anew.

10th May Now the French are marching upon us in the Toggenburg too, though only in some of the lower communes, and are doing what soldiers do, eating and drinking and getting the best of everything. What people don't give them, they take.

11th May They are marching directly by Gossau towards St.Gallen. There are said to be 100 hussars and 800 infantry. I pity dear, good St. Gallen from the bottom of my heart. Yet people say that they are behaving peacefully so long as they get their way.

12th May They are coming away from St Gallen already through canton Appenzell as far as us at Lichtensteig and Wattwil, and are billeted in the houses of the surrounding districts. They are said to have received orders for a prompt retreat, the reason for which no-one yet knows exactly.

That was indeed a happening in the Toggenburg that neither we nor our fathers had seen before. Lichtensteig and the village of Wattwil could not hold them all. For half an hour's distance around in the nearest well-off houses they were lodged by 2, 3 to 6 men, according to opportunity and what property the house had. People ran from all the neighbouring communes, down from all the hills, to gaze upon the Frenchmen, who were after all not making much of a show. The hussars were fairly well mounted, and all well-built strong fellows. But the infantry were a terribly motley lot, not to be compared with the Prussians that I once saw, not even with the worst of the Imperial troops. But it is not to be wondered at after many years of hardship, and nowhere any store of uniforms, the lads were a motley collection in tunics of all sorts.

On the 13th [May] the Frenchmen departed once more and marched through the Hummelwald to Uznach and Schmerikon. We were all happy indeed that we were so soon rid of these guests. They had the best of everything, but no payment anywhere, not even a kind word did they give for it. A nation which can give orders everywhere in half of Europe, shall they pay any reckoning? No, we have to be glad if they don't ask for some impossible thing that we can't scare up for them.

14th May I too cast an eye upon these fellows and would have been heartily glad to espy among them a kind face or a friendly glance or any feature that betrayed humanity. But either my eyes are good for nothing, or I was not skilful enough. For I saw nothing of the kind. But it is only natural, their wild gloomy eyes. But their fierce expressions! And their comic mustachios and all their furious lineaments stirred in me feelings of sadness and thoughtfulness.

15th May I was a fool, thought I today, to seek benevolent faces among these wild men of war. No, they are not to be found among such hordes, they dwell in peaceful huts, in the circle of better men, where they can work for the good of humanity, not to the murder of their brothers and devastation of the earth.

16th May I overheard the hussars and infantry as they talked among themselves as friends, and however brotherly their mutual smiles might seem, I thought to read in their eyes that they were

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