spots of dirt on my clothes,
of which I was dreadfully ashamed. In fact, I was a regular little
urchin." Perhaps we should not be wrong in surmising that the old man
was here reading into his childhood the habits and sentiments of his
later years. Young boys of his class are not usually deeply concerned
about grease spots or disheveled hair.

Attacks the Drum

At all events, if deplorably neglected in these personal matters, he was
really making progress with his art. Under Frankh's tuition he attained
to some proficiency on the violin and the harpsichord, and his voice was
so improved that, as an early biographer puts it, he was able to "sing
at the parish desk in a style which spread his reputation through the
canton." Haydn himself, going back upon these days in a letter of 1779,
says: "Our Almighty Father (to whom above all I owe the most profound
gratitude) had endowed me with so much facility in music that even in my
sixth year I was bold enough to sing some masses in the choir." He was
bold enough to attempt something vastly more ponderous. A drummer
being wanted for a local procession, Haydn undertook to play the part.
Unluckily, he was so small of stature that the instrument had to be
carried before him on the back of a colleague! That the colleague
happened to be a hunchback only made the incident more ludicrous. But
Haydn had rather a partiality for the drum--a satisfying instrument,
as Mr George Meredith says, because of its rotundity--and, as we
shall learn when we come to his visits to London, he could handle the
instrument well enough to astonish the members of Salomon's orchestra.
According to Pohl, the particular instrument upon which he performed on
the occasion of the Hainburg procession is still preserved in the choir
of the church there.

Hard as these early years must have been, Haydn recognized in after-life
that good had mingled with the ill. His master's harshness had taught
him patience and self-reliance. "I shall be grateful to Frankh as long
as I live," he said to Griesinger, "for keeping me so hard at work."
He always referred to Frankh as "my first instructor," and, like Handel
with Zachau, he acknowledged his indebtedness in a practical way by
bequeathing to Frankh's daughter, then married, 100 florins and a
portrait of her father--a bequest which she missed by dying four years
before the composer himself.

A Piece of Good Fortune

Haydn had been two years with Frankh when an import