biographer puts it, he was able to "sing at the parish desk in a
style which spread his reputation through the canton." Haydn
himself, going back upon these days in a letter of 1779, says:
"Our Almighty Father (to whom above all I owe the most profound
gratitude) had endowed me with so much facility in music that
even in my sixth year I was bold enough to sing some masses in
the choir." He was bold enough to attempt something vastly more
ponderous. A drummer being wanted for a local procession, Haydn
undertook to play the part. Unluckily, he was so small of stature
that the instrument had to be carried before him on the back of a
colleague! That the colleague happened to be a hunchback only
made the incident more ludicrous. But Haydn had rather a
partiality for the drum--a satisfying instrument, as Mr George
Meredith says, because of its rotundity--and, as we shall learn
when we come to his visits to London, he could handle the
instrument well enough to astonish the members of Salomon's
orchestra. According to Pohl, the particular instrument upon
which he performed on the occasion of the Hainburg procession is
still preserved in the choir of the church there.

Hard as these early years must have been, Haydn recognized in
after-life that good had mingled with the ill. His master's
harshness had taught him patience and self-reliance. "I shall be
grateful to Frankh as long as I live," he said to Griesinger,
"for keeping me so hard at work." He always referred to Frankh as
"my first instructor," and, like Handel with Zachau, he
acknowledged his indebtedness in a practical way by bequeathing
to Frankh's daughter, then married, 100 florins and a portrait of
her father--a bequest which she missed by dying four years before
the composer himself.