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 lessons," in tears. What indications, if any, the child had given of remarkable musical genius, we do not know,--not one of the many anecdotes bearing upon this point having any trustworthy foundation in fact. Probably the father discovered in him that which awakened the hope of some time rivalling the then recent career of Leopold Mozart with little Wolfgang, or at least saw reason to expect as much success with his son as had rewarded the efforts of his neighbor Ries with his Franz; at all events, we have the testimony of Beethoven himself, that "already in his fourth year music became his principal employment,"--and this it continued to be to the end. Yet, as he grew older, his education in other respects was not neglected. He passed through the usual course of boys of his time, not destined for the universities, in the public schools of the city, even to the acquiring of some knowledge of Latin. The French language was, as it still is, a necessity to every person of the Rhine provinces above the rank of peasant; and Beethoven became able to converse in it with reasonable fluency, even after years of disuse and almost total loss of hearing. It has also been stated that he knew enough of English to read it; but this is more than doubtful. In fact, as a schoolboy, he made the usual progress,--no more, no less.