ike Paganini, and so Mozart wrote his music on a
table in one corner of a beer-garden, and waltzed with his wife,
Constance, to keep warm when there was no fire and the weather was cold,
and all the time danced attendance on the Archbishop of Salzburg. All of
his feeble, spasmodic efforts at freedom came to naught, because there
was no persistency behind them.

Gladly would he have sold his services for three hundred gulden a year,
but even this sum, equal to one hundred fifty dollars a year, was denied
him. He was always composing, always making plans, always seeing the
silver tint in the clouds, but all of his music was taken by this one or
that in whom he foolishly trusted, and only debt and humiliation
followed him.

When at long intervals a sum would come his way from a generous admirer
touched with pity, all the beggars in the neighborhood seemed to know it
at once. Then it was that music filled the air at the beer-garden,
carking care and unkind fate were for the time forgot, and all went
merry as a wedding-bell.

Finally the position of Court Musician to the Emperor of Austria fell
vacant, and certain good friends of Mozart secured him the place. But
the Emperor was not like Frederick the Great, for he could not
distinguish one tune from another, and did not consider it any special
virtue so to do. The result was that his musicians were looked after by
his valet, and Mozart found that his position was really no better than
it had been with the Archbishop of Salzburg.

And still his mind proved infirm of purpose, and he had not the courage
to demand his right, for fear he might lose even the little that he
had.

* * * * *

Buffalo: Mozart was in his twentieth year when he met Aloysia Weber. She
was a gifted singer, surely, and was needlessly healthy. She was of that
peculiar, heartless type that finds digression in leading men a merry
chase and then flaunting and flouting them. Young Mozart, the
impressionable, Mozart the delicate and sensitive, Mozart the AEolian
harp, played upon by every passing breeze, loved this bouncing bundle of
pink-and-white tyranny.

She encouraged the passion, and it gradually grew until it absorbed the
boy and he grew oblivious to all else. He lived in her smile, bathed in
the sunshine of her presence, fed on her words, and as for her singing
in opera it was not so much what her voice was now but what he was sure
it would be.

His glowing imag