He now evidently thought the days of his apprenticeship over, and proceeded at once to make a thorough fool of himself--as I have said, for the only time in his life. He was friendly with the family of a wig-maker named Keller, and gave lessons to his two daughters. He fell in love with the younger. That might have been well enough. But the girl elected to become a nun, and Haydn, either of his free and particularly asinine will, or through persuasion, married the elder, Anne Marie, on November 26, 1760. He was fully aware that his master, Count Morzin, would keep no married man in his employ, so that his act was doubly foolish. However, as it happened, that did not so much matter. Morzin had to rid himself of such an expensive encumbrance as an orchestra, and, marriage or no marriage, Haydn would have found himself without a post. He quickly got another position, so that one bad consequence of hasty marriage did not count. The other consequence remained--he still had a wife. She was, from all accounts, a demon of a wife. He had to separate from her, and long afterwards she wrote to him asking him to buy her a certain house which would suit her admirably as soon as he was good enough to leave her a happy widow. It is satisfactory to know that Haydn bought the house for himself, and lived in it, and that the lady died before him, though only eight years. He had borne privation, hunger, cold, wet beds to sleep in, with the inveterate cheeriness that never left him. He worked on steadily until his old age in the service he now entered--that of Prince Anton Esterhazy. Until the year 1791, when he adventured far away for the first time to come to London, his outward life was as regular and uneventful as that of a steady Somerset House clerk. There is next to nothing to record, and I will spare the patient reader the usual stock of fabulous anecdotes, the product of hearsay and loose imaginations. Let us turn for a moment to what he had learnt and actually achieved during the first thirty years of his life. CHAPTER III THE EARLY MUSIC