morning and a bird outside
is singing a song that is in my heart. I am going out to catch the
strain and write it down as my own and yours. I shall be back in an
hour."

* * * * *

East Aurora: Aloysia married the man of her choice--an actor by the name
of Lange. They quarreled right shortly, and soon he used to beat her.
This was endured for a year or more, then she left him. For a while she
lived with Wolfgang and Constance, and Mozart, true to his nature, gave
her from his own scanty store and deprived himself for her benefit. He
stood godfather to one of her children and was a true friend to her to
the last.

After Aloysia lived to be an old woman, and long after Mozart had passed
out, and the world had begun to utter his praises, she said: "I never
for a moment thought he was a genius--I always considered him just a
nice little man."

Mozart's soul was filled with melody, and all of his music is faultless
and complete. He possessed the artistic conscience to a degree that is
unique. Careless and heedless in all else, if his mood was not right and
the product was halting, he straightway destroyed the score. He was
always at work, always hearing sweet sounds, always weighing and
balancing them in the delicate scales of his judgment.

So absorbed was he in his art that he fell an easy victim to the
designing, and never stopped his work long enough to strike off the
shackles that bound him to a vain, selfish and unappreciative court.

Worn by constant work, worried by his wife's continued illness, dogged
by creditors, and unable to get justice from those who owed it to him,
his nerves at the early age of thirty-five gave way.

His vitality rapidly declined and at last went out as a candle does when
blown upon by a sudden gust from an open door.

It was a blustering winter day in December, Seventeen Hundred
Ninety-one, when his burial occurred. A little company of friends
assembled, but no funeral-dirge was played for him, save the blast blown
through the naked branches of the trees, as they hurried the plain pine
coffin to its final resting-place. At the gate of the cemetery the few
friends turned back and left the lifeless clay to the old gravedigger,
who never guessed the honor thus done him.

It was a pauper's grave that closed over the body of Mozart--coffin
piled on coffin, and no one marked the spot. All we know is, that
somewhere in Saint Mark's Cemetery, Vienna, was bu