It has always seemed to me the great composers had fine luck in being born so long ago, before the towns had grown big and dirty, before the locomotive and motor-car had denied the beautiful earth, and stinking factories floundered over all the lands. Carlyle rightly grows eloquent on the value of the sweet country air and sights and sounds to young Teufelsdröckh, and Haydn must have taken impressions of sunrises, sunsets, midday splendours, and the ever-plashing river flowing to the far-away sea, that afterwards went to the making of his most wonderful music. He had to go out early to fight his way in the world; only six years of peaceful village life, free from care and responsibility, were allowed him. Those first years, I take it, were happy enough. Mathias was only, it is true, a wheelwright, and in time there were a dozen mouths to feed. But we hear of him and Maria making music only in the evenings; his days were more profitably occupied. It goes very much without saying that he was not rich--in what age or clime are working wheelwrights rich?--but he cannot be called poor. Poverty is a comparative term; even to-day peasants feel its biting teeth only when they desert or are driven from their country-side, and make for the overcrowded towns. Joseph, but for a few accidents, might have remained a peasant all his days, and never faced what he would consider hardship. The first accident was his voice, which was undoubtedly of singular beauty; the second was an extraordinary musical aptitude, which led him to sing expressively and perfectly in tune the airs he heard his father and mother sing. Mathias, by the way, accompanied himself on the harp; and Joseph, long before he had a fiddle of his own, imitated the fiddling of his elders with two bits of wood, so the family orchestra was complete. The last accident was the arrival of one Frankh, a distant relative. This was long before the magical feats of the baby Mozart had set every grasping parent staring for signs of musical precocity in his children. But Mathias undoubtedly wanted to do his best for his boy, and Joseph himself must have had ambition of a sort--witness his endeavours to play the fiddle without a fiddle to play--and when Frankh undertook to place the boy in a choir and teach him music, the offer was joyfully accepted. So he went to Hainburg, never to return to Rohrau until he was an old and celebrated man.