“The music told the story of Franz’s love; it was bright with all his dreams, and sorrowful with his great despair.  Never had such music been heard; so sweet, so sunlit in its joys, so radiant in its sadness.  But the Arch-Duke and his Court, startled by the new accent of this music, and influenced by the local and established musicians, who were envious of this newcomer, listened in frigid silence, so that the common people in the gallery dared not show signs of their delight.  In fact, the opera was a complete failure.  Public opinion followed the Court, and found no words, bad or strong enough to condemn what they called the new-fangled rubbish.  Among those who blamed the new work there was none so bitter as the citizen whose children Franz had been teaching.  For this man considered himself to be a genius, and was inordinately vain, and his ignorance was equal to his conceit.  He dismissed Franz from his service.  All doors were now closed to him, and being on the verge of starvation he was reduced to earning his bread in the streets by playing his pipe.  This also proved unsuccessful, and it was with difficulty that he earned a few pence every day.

“At last he burnt all his manuscripts, and went into the hills; the hill people welcomed him, but their kindness came too late; his heart was broken, and when sickness came to him with the winter snow, he had no longer any strength to resist it.  The peasants found him one day lying cold and stiff in his hut.  They buried him on the hill-side.  The night of his funeral a strange fiddler with a shining face was seen standing beside his grave and playing the most lovely tunes on a violin.

“The name of Franz was soon forgotten, but although he died obscure and penniless he left a rich legacy.  For he taught the hill-people three songs, the songs he had sung at Court in honour of Princess Kunigmunde, and they never died.  They spread from the hills to the plains, from the plains to the river, from the river to the woods, and indeed you can still hear them on the hills of the north, on the great broad rivers of the east, and in the orchards of the south.”

A CHINAMAN ON OXFORD

“Yes, I am a student,” said the Chinaman, “And I came here to study the English manners and customs.”

We were seated on the top of the electric tram which goes to Hampton Court.  It was a bitterly cold spring day.  The suburbs of London were not looking their best.

“I spent three days at Oxford last week,” he said.

“It’s a beautiful place, is it not?” I remarked.

The Chinaman smiled.  “The country which you see from the windows of the railway carriages,” he said, “on the way from Oxford to London strikes me as being beautiful.  It reminded me of the Chinese Plain, only it is prettier.  But the houses at Oxford are hideous:  there is no symmetry about them.  The houses in this country are like blots on the landscape.  In China the houses are made to harmonise with the landscape just as trees do.”