last year, in April, she buried, in less than a week after his birth,
her first-born, Ludwig Maria,--as the name still stands upon the
baptismal records of the parish of St. Remigius, with the names of
Kapellmeister Beethoven, and the next-door neighbor, Frau Loher, as
sponsors. This second-born is a strong, healthy child, and his baptism
is recorded in the same parish-book, Dec. 17, 1770,--the day of,
possibly the day after, his birth,--by the name of Ludwig. The
Kapellmeister is again godfather, but Frau Gertrude Mueller, _nee_ Baum,
next door on the other side, is the godmother. The Beethovens had
neither kith nor kin in Bonn; the families Ries and Salomon, their
intimate friends, were Israelites; hence the appearance of the
neighbors, Frauen Loher and Mueller, at the ceremony of baptism;--a
strong corroborative evidence, that No. 515, Bonngasse, was the actual
birth-place of Beethoven.

The child grew apace, and in manhood his earliest and proudest
recollections, save of his mother, were of the love and affection
lavished upon him, the only grandchild, by the Kapellmeister. He had
just completed his third year when the old man died, and the bright sun
which had shone upon his infancy, and left an ineffaceable impression
upon the child's memory, was obscured. Johann van Beethoven had
inherited his mother's failing, and its effects were soon visible in the
poverty of the family. He left the Bonngasse for quarters in that
house in the Rheingasse, near the upper steamboat-landing, which now
erroneously bears the inscription, _Ludwig van Beethovens Geburtshaus_.

His small inheritance was soon squandered; his salary as singer was
small, and at length even the portrait of his father went to the
pawnbroker. In the April succeeding the Kapellmeister's death, the
expenses of Johann's family were increased by the birth of another
son,--Caspar Anton Carl; and to this event Dr. Wegeler attributes the
unrelenting perseverance of the father in keeping little Ludwig from
this time to his daily lessons upon the piano-forte. Both Wegeler and
Burgomaster Windeck of Bonn, sixty years afterward, remembered how, as
boys, visiting a playmate in another house across the small court, they
often "saw little Louis, his labors and sorrows." Cecilia Fischer, too,
a playmate of Beethoven in his early childhood, and living in the same
house in her old age, "still saw the little boy standing upon a low
footstool and practising his father's les