That he was able, partly by the ear and partly by the eye, to judge of the correctness of the performance of his music, Schindler states in the same article--a fact also known from many other sources; this was the case even to his last year. When, after the death of Beethoven, such of his manuscripts and papers as were thought to be salable were set apart, there remained in the hands of von Breuning a lot of letters, documents and Conversation Books. The estimated value in the inventory of the manuscripts and the price obtained for them at the auction sale, indicate how utterly worthless from a pecuniary point of view that other collection was thought to be; as, however, they might be of use to some future biographer, it was well to have them preserved, and doubtless a small gratification to Schindler for his great sacrifices and very valuable services to Beethoven in these last months, the only one which he as guardian to the absent nephew could make; so Breuning gave them to him. The Conversation Books, counting in as such those which were really nothing but a sheet or two of paper loosely folded, were only about 400 in number, or less than fifty per annum for the last eight and a half years of Beethoven’s life--that being the period which they cover. Schindler, who spoke on this as on so many other topics frankly and without reserve, said that he long preserved the books and papers intact, but not finding any person but himself who placed any value upon them, their weight and bulk had led him in the course of his long unsettled life by degrees to destroy those which he deemed to be of little or no importance. The remainder were, in 1845, transferred to the Royal Library in Berlin, and, in 1855, when they were examined for this work, numbered 138. It was but natural that those preserved are such as place Schindler’s relation to the master in the strongest light and those deemed by him essential to the full understanding of the more important events of Beethoven’s last years. Most of them bear evidence of the deep interest with which Schindler, while they remained in his possession, lived over the past in them. In many cases he appended the names of the principal writers; so that one soon learns to distinguish their hands without difficulty; and occasionally he enriched them with valuable annotations.[9] The larger of them--ordinary blank note-books--are only of a size and thickness fitted to be carried in the coat-pocket. It is obvious, therefore, on a moment’s reflection, that at a single sitting with a few friends in an inn or coffee-house, the pages must have filled rapidly as the book passed from hand to hand and one or another wrote question or reply, remark or statement, a bit of news or a piece of advice. A few such conversations, one sees, would fill a book, all the sooner as there is no thought of economizing space and each new sentence is usually also a new paragraph. It strikes