The true woman in the case makes her entrée in this innocent style: "Mrs. Schroeter presents her complements to Mr. Haydn, and informs him that she is just returned to town, and will be very happy to see him whenever it is convenient to him to give her a lesson.

Just nineteen years before this little preludising note, Mrs. Schroeter was an Englishwoman of wealth and aristocracy.

In that year there came to London a German musician, Johann Samuel Schroeter, a brother of Corona Schroeter, one of that Amazonian army of beauties to whom Goethe made love and wrote poetry.

In that year there came to London a German musician, Johann Samuel Schroeter, a brother of Corona Schroeter, one of that Amazonian army of beauties to whom Goethe made love and wrote poetry.

Sixteen years after his entry into London Schroeter died of consumption.

Mrs. Schroeter, apparently not sated by her first experience, proceeds to repeat it pat.

Let us also dismiss as unauthorised and gratuitous the words of Pauline D. Townsend, in her biography of Haydn, when she says of Mrs. Schroeter that she was "an attractive, although, according to modern taste, a somewhat vulgar woman, of over sixty years of age, and there is no disguising the fact that she made violent love to Haydn.

" The existence of Mrs. Schroeter's veritable Love Letters of an Englishwoman was known for many years, and Pohl in his book on "Mozart und Haydn in London" quoted from them.

Two of them are signed R.S. and this leads me to believe that Mrs. Schroeter's first name began with R., though we know neither that nor her maiden name.

In the first letter Mrs. Schroeter says that she encloses him "the words of the song you desire."

In his note-book there is an entry on February 13, 1792, and just preceding it a little Italian poem in which I have been pleased to see what was possibly this very song, its first lines being suggestively like the first line of Mrs. Schroeter's letter.

This much more pleasantly situated dwelling, he probably owed to the considerate care of Mrs. Schroeter, who, by the same token, thus brought him nearer to herself.

A short and pleasant walk of scarcely ten minutes through St. James's Palace and the Mall (a broad alley alongside of St. James's Park) led him to Buckingham Palace, and near at hand was the house of Mrs. Schroeter.

When he went away from London for ever, he left behind him the scores of his six last symphonies "in the hands of a lady," probably Mrs. Schroeter.