The pleasure he felt at hearing it piped so comically altered induced him to buy the bird. He grew very much attached to his "Vogel Stahrl," as indeed he was to all animals, especially birds, and when it died he erected a gravestone to its memory in his garden, with an epitaph in verse.[113] The excessive neatness of the account-books leads us to fear that they were not persevered with for any very long time, and indeed it is almost surprising that Mozart should have kept them for a whole year, from March, 1784, to February, 1785. After that he handed them over to his wife, and the entries soon cease. Certainly Niemetschek is right in saying that "even if the same indulgence be granted to Mozart that we must all wish to see extended to ourselves, he cannot be put forward as an example of carefulness and economy." Whoever, like Mozart, begins his housekeeping with nothing at all, or even with debts, and is dependent upon an uncertain and fluctuating income, has need of the strictest economy and regularity, amounting even to parsimony, if he is to extricate himself from his difficulties or attain to competence; otherwise occasional strokes of good fortune are seldom of use--indeed are sometimes positive hindrances." Regularity and economy were, as we have seen, qualities not in Mozart's nature, and he never acquired them. Their absence sufficiently accounts for his constant financial embarrassments. He atoned for his errors and weakness by poverty and want, by sorrow and care, by shame and humiliation; he was spared none of the punishment which life ruthlessly inflicts on those who do not conform to the laws of her iron necessity. But death has wiped out the stain, and the misrepresentations of envious detractors and petty fault-finders have no power to touch that which is immortal. FOOTNOTES OF CHAPTER 27 [Footnote 1: Cf. Friedel, Briefe aus Wien (1784), p. 409.] [Footnote 2: Mozart himself wrote this to his father, who communicates it to Marianne (September 17, 1785).] [Footnote 3: Kelly, Reminisc., I., p. 225.] [Footnote 4: A. M. z., I., p. 855.]