United States or Norfolk Island ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In spite of his youth, however, the impression he made on all those with whom he came in contact was that of a man of riper years, whose character was formed. When I was asked long afterwards whether I had ever met a man who, morally speaking, was the beau-ideal of real character and uprightness, I could, on reflection, think of none other than this newly gained friend, Jakob Sulzer.
Besides hunting foxes, we were to trap ermines and kill white hares, for I wanted to have a rug of their skins. I remembered that I had slept between two rugs of white hare skins, and how beautiful, soft, and warm they were. After this talk Jakob went off after reindeer, and returned with three of them. In a short time our preparations for camping were made.
Nor was the life at all solitary, for various farmers were sending up their cattle to other Olms about the same time, so that no one was without neighbors, although they might be at a considerable distance apart. Jakob spoke on until we became wild to go up to the Olm too. "Could we go thither," we asked, "and pay him a visit?" "That we could," he replied, "if we did not mind sleeping in the hay.
Ten minutes later the mystery was solved by the identical Jakob, attended by Franz, reappearing from the chamber, not, however, in the hard-working dress in which they had entered, but in full Sunday array, the leather boots upon their feet and broad-brimmed, flower-bedecked beavers in their hands.
The white fox had become so scarce that we concluded to leave our camp for good, and Jakob went to get our reindeer. After packing we retraced our steps towards his home, his tent on the snow. In one place where we stopped to rest I suddenly noticed that our reindeer had got loose. I shouted to Jakob, who was quietly taking a little snooze on the snow, "Our reindeer are loose!"
Christmas morning, when Master Jakob had preached his sermon in the church, Gustav spoke to the congregation out in the snow-covered churchyard. A gravestone was his pulpit. Eloquent always, his sorrows and wrongs and the memory of the hard months lent wings to his words. His speech lives yet in Dalecarlia, for now he was among its mountains.
Here it was agreed that Jakob and the Lapps who had taken me to this place should not go further, but that I should be taken care of by Finlanders, whose destination was the same as mine and who were on their way to the Arctic Sea. I was to go with John Puranen. John was a powerfully built man, with a very kind expression. We were soon good friends.
The same young men who had been so kind to me on my first journey through Zurich again showed themselves anxious to be continually in my company, and this was especially the case with one young fellow called Jakob Sulzer. He had to be thirty years of age before he was entitled to become a member of the Zurich government, and he therefore still had several years to wait.
Thus, though Hans Jakob could sit at his door, and almost count the ears of corn in his fields across the river, he must make a circuit of five miles to reach them. Such an immense loss of time and labor troubled him no little, and, as he had no desire to sell his property, he determined by hook or by crook to remedy the evil. Day and night he turned the perplexing problem over in his mind.
Jakob Wegelin, a Swiss, had, at the invitation of Frederick the Great, settled in Berlin, where he spent the last years of his life and devoted his study to the theory of history.
Word Of The Day