One day the headmaster from the neighboring town of Hainburg, a distant relative of the Haydn family, came to Rohrau. Meister Mathias and his wife gave their usual little concert, and five-year-old Joseph sat near his parents and sawed at his left arm with a stick, as if he were accompanying on the violin. It astonished the schoolteacher that the boy observed time so correctly. He inferred from this a natural talent for music and advised the parents to send their Sepperl ... to Hainburg so that he might be set to an art that in time would unfailingly open to him the prospect "of becoming a clergyman." The parents, ardent admirers of the clergy, joyfully seized this proposal, and in his sixth year Joseph went to the headmaster in Hainburg.