The Poor Man of Toggenburg - Autobiography of Ulrich Bräker

father and offered to pay him. Heavens! How he snarled at me: "Where did you get the money?" He was not far off boxing my ears into the bargain. At first I did not understand what was making him so terribly angry. But he soon made that clear as he continued: "You good-for-nothing! Borrowing on my property!" Then he tore the five guilders from my hand, ran straight to Jörg and gave them back to him, enjoining him, for the love of God, not to lend any more money to the lad, he would give him what he needed. So my joy was short-lived.

Father, when his anger had died down, began to explain at length to me that I need not pay him for the land, I could indeed pay him a little rent for it, the little scrap of ground should not trouble us more, but I should have all rights over it as if it were my own property. I could not believe him, for he was laughing up his sleeve all the time, which made me suspicious. But he had a good reason for it. At last I, poor simpleton that I was, was beginning to be easy in mind again, and to count my chickens before they hatched, thinking to what use I should in time put the coin - then one day the cows broke into my plot and ate the seedlings, and at the same time my firewood found no buyers and almost all of it remained on my hands. Such manifold misfortune took away my courage at once, I handed back the whole business to father, and received from him as indemnity a flannel neckerchief..

In my childhood years I attended school for only a few weeks each year, but at home I had no lack of desire to seek after knowledge of all kinds. I could learn by heart without much effort: I studied industriously in the Bible especially. I could recount without prompting many of the stories it contains, and I was always on the lookout for anything that might increase my learning. My father too liked to read works of history or mystic devotion. Just at this time a book was published, called "Der flüchtige Pater"

. He and our neighbour Hans spent many a long hour over it, and they believed as if it were Gospel in the prophecies contained therein, about the fall of Antichrist and the Judgement soon to come, heralding the end of the world. I too read much of it and to some of our neighbours I preached out of the Pater in a manner painfully devout, my hand clapped tight to my forehead, for half an evening at a time, and gave it all out as genuine coinage, and this according to my own firm conviction. For it never entered my head that anyone could write a book in which everything was not pure unadulterated truth, and since father and Hans did not doubt it, everything seemed to me all Yea and Amen. But it brought me to all manner of woeful imaginings. [...]

When, on the other hand, I saw father and our neighbour almost more cheerful than before, it made me quite confused, and even now I am not quite clear in my mind what was going on in theirs. This much I do know, that both of them were at that time heavily in debt, and perhaps they hoped to be freed of it by the end of the world; certainly I heard them speak at other times mainly of Newfoundland, Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia, of a way of escape, an exodus from Babylon

, also the costs of the journey thither, and so forth. Then I would prick up my ears like a hare. One day, I remember, there came into my hands a printed paper that one of them had left lying on the table, which contained information about such places. I read it a hundred times at least, my heart leapt in my body at the thought of this splendid Canaan, as I imagined it to be. O, if only we were there now, thought I. But the good men, I think, knew as little as I did of ways and means to go there, and probably even less about where to find the money. So the fine adventure ended there, and gradually all thought of it was forgotten.

"Der flüchtige Pater oder das durch der Heiligen Geist eröffnete versiegelte Buch" was an exposition of Revelations by Heinrich Fitzner, published at Bautzen in 1740. (Schiel).

Babylon: [Biblical expression symbolising a land of evil from which God's chosen people will escape to a Promised Land (Canaan) of all good things.]