nted,[10] and it is one of the most
instructive accounts that we possess of the life of the people. The
biography contains, in the first part, an abundance of characteristic
and pleasing features; the description of a poor family in a remote
valley; the bitter struggle with poverty; the doings of the herdsmen;
the first love of the young man; the cunning with which he was
kidnapped by the Prussian recruiting officer; and his compulsory
military service up to the battle of Lowositz; his flight home, and
subsequent weary struggle for existence; the description of his
household; and, finally, the resignation of a sensitive, enthusiastic
nature which, partly by its own fault, was disturbed in the firm tenor
of its own life, by a dreamy tendency and passionate ebullitions. The
poor man of Toggenburg displays, throughout his detailed statement, a
poetical and touching child-like spirit, a passionate desire to read,
reflect, and form himself--in short, a sensitive organisation which was
ruled by humours and phantasies.

Ulrich Braecker was at his home in Toggenburg, with his father, occupied
in felling wood, when an acquaintance of the family, a wandering
miller, approached the workers, and advised the honest, simple Braecker
to go from the valley to the city, in order to make his fortune there.
Amid the blessings of parents and sisters, the honest youth wanders
with the friend of the family to Schaffhausen; there he was taken to an
inn, where he made acquaintance with a foreign officer. When his
companion accidentally absented himself for a short time, he agreed to
remain with the officer as servant. The family friend returns, and is
highly irate, not that Ulrich had entered into service, but that he had
done this without his interposition; and had thus diminished his
commission fee. It turned out afterwards that he himself had carried
off the son of his countryman, in order to sell him, and that he had
intended to ask twenty _Friedrichsdor_ for him. Ulrich, dressed in a
new livery, lived for a time very jovially as servant of his dissipated
master--the Italian Markoni--without concerning himself particularly
about the secret transactions of the latter. He felt comfortable in his
new position, and wrote a succession of cheerful letters to his parents
and his love. At last his master made use of a lie to send him further
into the country, and finally to Berlin; he there discovered, with
horror, that his beautiful livery and hi