When at long intervals a sum would come his way from a generous admirer touched with pity, all the beggars in the neighborhood seemed to know it at once. Then it was that music filled the air at the beer-garden, carking care and unkind fate were for the time forgot, and all went merry as a wedding-bell. Finally the position of Court Musician to the Emperor of Austria fell vacant, and certain good friends of Mozart secured him the place. But the Emperor was not like Frederick the Great, for he could not distinguish one tune from another, and did not consider it any special virtue so to do. The result was that his musicians were looked after by his valet, and Mozart found that his position was really no better than it had been with the Archbishop of Salzburg. And still his mind proved infirm of purpose, and he had not the courage to demand his right, for fear he might lose even the little that he had. * * * * * Buffalo: Mozart was in his twentieth year when he met Aloysia Weber. She was a gifted singer, surely, and was needlessly healthy. She was of that peculiar, heartless type that finds digression in leading men a merry chase and then flaunting and flouting them. Young Mozart, the impressionable, Mozart the delicate and sensitive, Mozart the AEolian harp, played upon by every passing breeze, loved this bouncing bundle of pink-and-white tyranny. She encouraged the passion, and it gradually grew until it absorbed the boy and he grew oblivious to all else. He lived in her smile, bathed in the sunshine of her presence, fed on her words, and as for her singing in opera it was not so much what her voice was now but what he was sure it would be. His glowing imagination made good her every deficiency. He thought he loved the girl. It was not the girl at all he loved: he only loved the ideal that existed in his own heart. His father opposed the mating and hastily transferred the youth from Vienna to Paris; but who ever heard of opposition and argument and forced separation curing love? So matters ran on and letters and messages passed, and finally Mozart made his way back to Vienna and with breathless haste sought out the object of his whole heart's love. She had recently met a man she liked better, and as she could not hold them both, treated Mozart as a stranger, and froze him to the marrow. He was crushed, undone, and a fit of sickness followed. In his illness, Constance, a younger sister of Aloysia, came to him in pity and nursed him as a child. Very naturally, all the love he had felt for Aloysia was easily and readily transferred to Constance. The tendrils of the heart ruthlessly uprooted cling to the first object that presents itself.