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hymns or listen to someone reading aloud from the Bible or a pious book, but such meetings could also turn into circles of spiteful gossip or dirty talk.

One striking characteristic of Bräker's neighbours and other country people he met in the course of his wanderings, which is not mentioned by Simmler and Ebel, is their extreme caginess when talking to people they did not know well. Most of the conversations that Bräker reports from memory, or invents in his dialogues, are verbal judo in which the participants try to trip each other into disclosing information about themselves, or their opinions, while at the same time giving none of their own thoughts away. It is not a question of being sparing of speech, there are plenty of words but whole sentences are virtually devoid of meaning. Perhaps this is a part of the extremely conservative Swiss character, or an effect of living in times where religious or political conflict still ran under the surface, or perhaps it bears out the reputation of the inhabitants of the Toggenburg for always being on the lookout for somebody trying to do them down.

When opinions are expressed, it is usually with a good deal of defiant emphasis, and when speakers do give free rein to their tongues, as when Salome Bräker scolds her husband, their command of invective is impressive. Quite probably the original speech would have equalled the French of Rabelais, but we do not know, except in a few isolated sentences, exactly what was said; Bräker and his contemporaries spoke in their local dialects, but his writing approximates to standard German. The name of his homeland gives an example of the difference between the local pronunciation (Tockenburg) and standard German (Toggenburg). Similarly, when he joined the Moral Society of Lichtensteig the minute recording his membership described him as "Her Uli Prägger". His readers would not have been intrigued by "provincialisms" (regional dialect), or "coarse" (working-class) expressions, as we might be today, they would have found them distasteful. Such expressions were almost certainly thinned out, though not entirely abolished, by Bräker and his publishers, together with actual "bad language".

The following words, taken from G. Reynold's "Histoire littéraire de la Suisse au XVIIIe siècle" [History of Swiss literature in the 18th century], pp 33-34, though written of Switzerland in general, seem to me a good summing-up of Bräker and his neighbours:

"The man who inhabits these mountains is hardy and strong, sometimes coarse,
sometimes cruel, sober, but when he comes down to the plains, subject to violent fits of
intemperance, he lacks grace but not subtlety; he is at times a mocker to the point of
satire and religious to the point of superstition; forced leisure develops in him
imagination, intelligence, the need for culture, he is conservative and a lover of routine,
but when the niggard soil sometimes forces him to emigrate, he can become a
cosmopolitan, but in revenge homesickness will generally make him suffer. Add to these
characteristics, as their natural consequence, patriotism and the spirit of practicality and
utilitarianism - and we have the Alpine farmer."

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Notes on the edition and translation:

Bräker's autobiography, whose resounding original German title is "Lebensgeschichte und natürliche Ebentheuer des Armen Mannes im Tockenburg, von ihm selbst erzählt", was begun in 1781 and first published in 1788. The manuscript no longer exists and allowance has to be made for alterations made to its style by the editor-publisher. (How extensive these alterations were is a question that will be discussed later.) I have used chiefly the text from the Reclam edition (Leipzig, 1962), with an "afterword" by Hans Mayer, and the edition of Bräker's selected works by Samuel Voellmy (see below). Some use has been made of the editions by Hubert Schiel (Freiburg: Herder, 1951) and H.G. Thalheim (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1964), and an English edition and translation by Derek Bowman: "The life and real adventures of the Poor Man of

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