Love seems to have reached his heart at a late day but with compensating suddenness. It is nearly incredible that a man whose after life was so heart-busy should not have felt the tender passion till he was nearly thirty, but stranger things have happened, and the anecdote given by his friend Griesinger of his wild agitation when at the age of twenty-seven he was accompanying a young countess, and her neckerchief became disarranged for a moment, would seem to indicate a remarkably unsophisticated nature. A year later he found himself somewhat relieved of the burden of poverty that had always hampered him, and he remembered him of the two daughters of a Viennese wig-maker named Keller. Keller had frequently been kind to Haydn, and the younger daughter seems to have inspired him with an ardent love, but she took the veil. Elise Polko has worked up an elaborate fiction on this affair with her usual saccharinity. When the convent closed the younger Keller from the world, her father ingeniously suggested to Haydn that he might marry the elder sister. As Louis Nohl says, "Whatever may have been the reason, gratitude, ignorance, helplessness in practical matters, or wish to have a wife at once--whatever may have been the motive, he married, and sorely suffered for it." Anna Keller was older than Haydn, and the family religiousness that led the younger daughter to enter the convent, led Anna to contribute more of money to the Church, of food and society to the churchmen, and of her husband's compositions to the choir, than even so pious a Catholic as Haydn could afford or endure. An account of the married life of these two is given by Haydn's friend Carpani, which incidentally brings up a bit of literary thievery of unusual quaintness. Carpani wrote his "Le Haydine" in the form of letters from Vienna; they were published in Milan. Some time after one Marie Henri Beyle published in Paris what purported to be an original series of "Letters written from Vienna." He published these under the pen name of L.A.C. Bombet. Carpani exposed the theft, but a little later the imperturbable Beyle published a second edition of his work under the name De Stendhal. An English translation from the French work is commonly seen, though never with credit to Carpani. Carpani, in his account of the home life of the Haydns, says they were happy for a honeymoon. * * * * *