Page:Selected letters of Mendelssohn 1894.djvu/77

Rh off my coat on account of the heat. Now and then the general throws in the most wonderful stories about Beethoven, how one evening, when she was playing, he used the candle-snuffers for a tooth-pick, etc.

She told me how, when she lost her last child, Beethoven at first could not bring himself to come to the house. At last he begged her to visit him, and when she got there he sat down at the piano, and said only, “We will talk in music.” Then he played on for an hour, and as she expressed it, “He said everything to me, and in the end brought me consolation.”