At last he obtained the post of private teacher in the family of Count Esterhazy. It was the Countess Caroline, younger of the two daughters, who was to become the object of Schubert's later adoration. On the first visit, however, she was only nine, and we find Schubert, with his usual promiscuous taste, more at home with the servants than in the drawing-room. "The cook is a pleasant fellow," he writes; "the ladies' maid is thirty; the housemaid very pretty, and often pays me a visit; the nurse is somewhat ancient; the butler is my rival; the two grooms get on better with the horses than with us. The count is a little rough; the countess proud, but not without heart, and the two young ladies good children." Eight years later he spent another period of six months at the chateau, and at this time felt the passion for the young countess that has been so often alluded to in his biographies. According to Bauernfeld, she inspired an ideal devotion that sustained and comforted him to the end of his life. There can be no doubt that etiquette and their difference in position prevented much intercourse between the two, but his devotion was apparently as lasting as it was unselfish. According to Kreissle, it found expression once, on her asking him, in jesting reproach, why he never dedicated anything to her. "Why should I," came the reply; "everything I ever did is dedicated to you." One of his posthumous works bears her name, which would hardly have been printed unless found on the manuscript in the handwriting of this greatest of tone-poets. Mendelssohn came of a family that boasted an eminent intellectual leader of Judaism in the shape of Moses Mendelssohn, the composer's grandfather. Abraham, the father, brought up his two children, Fanny and Felix, in the Lutheran faith. Between the brother and sister there existed the most intimate understanding and affection, lasting through their entire lives. Both were musically gifted, possessing delicate hands and taper fingers that were often spoken of as if made expressly for playing Bach fugues.