I said: “No, master, thank you very much, I do not smoke.” “You should then go to-night to the theatre to hear the first performance of Calderon’s play ‘Above all Magic is Love,’ for which your father’s old friend Lassen has written the music and which he will conduct.” I assured the master that I would certainly go, but sensing a certain frigidity in the air, and feeling that so unimportant a person as myself must not take any more time of the great Liszt, I withdrew. That evening I went to the historic little theatre doubly hallowed by the productions and ministrations of Goethe, as well as the memorable times in the fifties when Liszt officiated there and conducted the first performances of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” in which my mother had sung _Ortrude_. The theatre was so small that you could almost see every person in it as in a drawing-room, and to my astonishment, in the first intermission, one of the servants of the theatre came to me and asked me if I were Herr Damrosch. When I answered in the affirmative he said that Kapellmeister Lassen wished to see me. I followed him to the stage and was immediately accosted by Lassen whom I had not met before, but of whom I knew, because he and my father had been close friends for many years. He said: “What did you do to the master this morning? I came in just after you left and found him in tears. He said, ‘a young son of Damrosch called on me this morning, I thought of course he would stay here and study with me, but instead of that he told me he was only going to stay two days. The young generation have forgotten me completely. They think nothing of me and they have no respect for us older men of bygone days. Am I a hotel in which one takes a room for a night, then to pass on elsewhere?’” Needless to say, I was overcome at such a dreadful development of a perfectly innocent remark of mine. I could not conceive it possible that so small a person as myself should have unwittingly brought about so tragic a result, and I implored Lassen to tell me how I could efface it. Lassen, seeing my unhappy state, advised me to go the next morning at eight o’clock to see Liszt again and to explain everything to him. I sat through the rest of the play but actually did not hear a word of it or a note of Lassen’s music; I was too occupied with my own misery. I did not sleep all night, but tossed about restlessly and at six arose and wandered about dismally until seven when a frowsy waiter in the dining-room of my hotel, the “Russische Erb Prinz” gave me a cup of coffee. Punctually at eight o’clock I knocked at Liszt’s door and as I entered I saw this wonderful-looking old man with his splendid white hair and deep-set eyes, already at his work-table. As he saw me his eyebrows arched and said: “What, still in Weimar?”