elieved to be the precursor of his death, we now
know to have been Count Walseck, who had recently lost his wife, and
wished a musical memorial.

His final sickness attacked the composer while laboring at the requiem.
The musical world was ringing with the fame of his last opera. To the
dying man was brought the offer of the rich appointment of organist of
St. Stephen's Cathedral. Most flattering propositions were made him by
eager managers, who had become thoroughly awake to his genius when it
was too late. The great Mozart was dying in the very prime of his youth
and his powers, when success was in his grasp and the world opening wide
its arms to welcome his glorious gifts with substantial recognition;
but all too late; for he was doomed to die in his spring-tide, though "a
spring mellow with all the fruits of autumn."

The unfinished requiem lay on the bed, and his last efforts were to
imitate some peculiar instrumental effects, as he breathed out his life
in the arms of his wife and his friend Suessmaier.

The epilogue to this life-drama is one of the saddest in the history of
art: a pauper funeral for one of the world's greatest geniuses. "It was
late one winter afternoon," says an old record, "before the coffin was
deposited on the side aisles on the south side of St. Stephen's. Van
Swieten, Salieri, Suessmaier, and two unknown musicians were the only
persons present besides the officiating priest and the pall-bearers.
It was a terribly inclement day; rain and sleet came down fast; and an
eye-witness describes how the little band of mourners stood shivering
in the blast, with their umbrellas up, round the hearse, as it left
the door of the church. It was then far on in the dark cold December
afternoon, and the evening was fast closing in before the solitary
hearse had passed the Stubenthor, and reached the distant graveyard of
St. Marx, in which, among the 'third class,' the great composer of the
'G minor Symphony' and the 'Requiem' found his resting-place. By this
time the weather had proved too much for all the mourners; they had
dropped off one by one, and Mozart's body was accompanied only by the
driver of the carriage. There had been already two pauper funerals that
day--one of them a midwife--and Mozart was to be the third in the grave
and the uppermost.

"When the hearse drew up in the slush and sleet at the gate of the
graveyard, it was welcomed by a strange pair, Franz Harruschka, the
assistant grave-