influence of pedantry. He realized that it lay with himself to
develop and nurture the powers within his breast of which he was
conscious. "The talent was in me," he remarked, "and by dint of
hard work I managed to get on." Shortly before his death, when
he happened to be in Vienna for some church festival, he had an
opportunity of speaking to the choir-boys of that time. "I was
once a singing boy," he said. "Reutter brought me from Hainburg
to Vienna. I was industrious when my companions were at play.
I used to take my little clavier under my arm, and go off to
practice undisturbed. When I sang a solo, the baker near St
Stephen's yonder always gave me a cake as a present. Be good
and industrious, and serve God continually."

A Sixteen-Part Mass!

It is pathetic to think of the boy assiduously scratching
innumerable notes on scraps of music paper, striving with yet
imperfect knowledge to express himself, and hoping that by some
miracle of inspiration something like music might come out of it.
"I thought it must be all right if the paper was nice and full,"
he said. He even went the length of trying to write a mass in
sixteen parts--an effort which Reutter rewarded with a shrug and
a sneer, and the sarcastic suggestion that for the present two
parts might be deemed sufficient, and that he had better perfect
his copying of music before trying to compose it. But Haydn was
not to be snubbed and snuffed out in this way. He appealed to his
father for money to buy some theory books. There was not too much
money at Rohrau, we may be sure, for the family was always
increasing, and petty economies were necessary. But the
wheelwright managed to send the boy six florins, and that sum was