rness, piety, thrift and orderliness were there, and probably
the happiest part of his career was that which he spent in the tiny,
dim-lighted rooms within sound of Leitha's waters.

In later life, when his name had been inscribed on the roll of fame,
he looked back to the cottage at Rohrau, "sweet through strange years,"
with a kind of mingled pride and pathetic regret. Flattered by the great
and acclaimed by the devotees of his art, he never felt ashamed of his
lowly origin. On the contrary, he boasted of it. He was proud, as he
said, of having "made something out of nothing." He does not seem
to have been often at Rohrau after he was launched into the world, a
stripling not yet in his teens. But he retained a fond memory of his
birthplace. When in 1795 he was invited to inspect a monument erected
to his honour in the grounds of Castle Rohrau, he knelt down on the
threshold of the old home by the market-place and kissed the ground his
feet had trod in the far-away days of youth. When he came to make his
will, his thoughts went back to Rohrau, and one of his bequests provided
for two of its poorest orphans.

Genealogy

Modern theories of heredity and the origin of genius find but scanty
illustration in the case of Haydn. Unlike the ancestors of Bach and
Beethoven and Mozart, his family, so far as the pedigrees show, had
as little of genius, musical or other, in their composition, as the
families of Shakespeare and Cervantes. In the male line they were
hard-working, honest tradesmen, totally undistinguished even in their
sober walk in life. They came originally from Hainburg, where Haydn's
great-grandfather, Kaspar, had been among the few to escape massacre
when the town was stormed by the Turks in July 1683. The composer's
father, Matthias Haydn, was, like most of his brothers, a wheelwright,
combining with his trade the office of parish sexton. He belonged to the
better peasant class, and, though ignorant as we should now regard
him, was yet not without a tincture of artistic taste. He had been to
Frankfort during his "travelling years," and had there picked up some
little information of a miscellaneous kind. "He was a great lover of
music by nature," says his famous son, "and played the harp without
knowing a note of music." He had a fine tenor voice, and when the day's
toil was over he would gather his household around him and set them
singing to his well-meant accompaniment.

Haydn's Mother

It is rather a pr