ng with the same exuberance, addressing her as--

"Dearest, best, lovingest, fairest, enticingest,
by-an-unworthy-cousin-to-harness-broken."

With her name he puns on _Baesle_ and _Bass_, thence, "_Baeschen oder
Violoncellchen_"--a little bass-viol or violoncelline. He writes, as he
says, to appease her "alluring beauty (_visibilia et invisibilia_)
heightened by wrath to the height of your slipper-heel." Then he writes
her a passionate parody on a poem of Klopstock's, and writes it in
circular form around his own sketch of her portrait, which implies
neither beauty on her part nor art on his.

This is the last letter he seems ever to have written her excepting a
business letter two years later. And this marks the end of a flirtation
which he seems to have regarded as sheer frivolity. But this was not her
mood. Biographer Jahn says:

"The Baesle seems to have taken her cousin's courtship seriously; at
least all the neighbours thought from the way she spoke of him that
there was something of deluded expectation in her tone. She spoke
neither gladly nor often of this time. She was not musical and could not
have had a proper appreciation of Mozart's artistic value. His vivacity
and velocity of musical performance seemed comical to her. Of her later
life nothing is known to me; she lived later with the Postmaster Streite
in Bayreuth and died there Jan. 25, 1841, at the great age of
eighty-three."

So much for the Baesle. Poor girl! But while the hollyhock was taking the
bee's fickleness so solemnly, a rose was revenging her upon him. A more
serious--for Mozart a very serious--affair, was his infatuation with
Aloysia Weber, a fifteen-year-old girl with much beauty and little
heart.

When Mozart was in Manheim in 1778, writing flowery letters to the
Baesle, he had occasion to have certain music copied, to be sung before
the Princess of Orange, who had become interested in his work. The
copyist was also a prompter in the theatre and a very poor, but
hospitable man. His name was Weber, and his brother became the father
of Carl Maria von Weber, the composer.

The fact that Weber was poor was the first recommendation to Mozart.
Another magnet was, that Weber had a daughter fifteen years old who was
gifted with a voice and seemed capable of a great artistic career. It
was this vicarious ambition that had interested him in the young singer
Keiserin some years before. And now we find him writing to his father on
Jan. 17, 177