The visit of the Danish composer, flautist and director, Friedrich Kuhlau, led to a right merry feast, for a description of which Seyfried found a place in the appendix of his “Studien.” That the boundaries of nice taste in conversation and story-telling may have been strained a bit is an inference from the fact that several pages of the Conversation Book containing the recorded relics of the affair are missing. After a promenade through the Helenenthal in which Beethoven amused himself by setting all manner of difficult tasks in hill-climbing, the party sat down to dinner at an inn. Champagne flowed freely, and after the return to Beethoven’s lodgings red Vöslauer, brought from his closet or cellar, did its share still further to elevate the spirits of the feasters. Beethoven seems to have held his own in the van of the revel. Kuhlau improvised a canon on B-a-c-h, to which Beethoven replied with the same notes as an opening motive and the words “Kühl, nicht lau” (“Cool, not lukewarm”)--a feeble play on the Danish musician’s name, but one which served to carry the music. Beethoven wrote his canon in the Conversation Book. The next day Kuhlau confessed to Schlesinger that he did not know how he had gotten home and to bed: Beethoven’s post-festal reflections may be gathered from the letter which accompanied a copy of the canon which he sent to Kuhlau by the hands of Holz: Baden, September 3, 1825. I must admit that the champagne went too much to my head also, yesterday, and that I was compelled again to make the experience that such things retard rather than promote my capacities; for easy as it generally is for me to meet a challenge on the instant, I do not at all remember what I wrote yesterday. In handing over letter and canon to Holz for delivery he wrote to him that he had scarcely reached home before it occurred to him that he might have made a dreadful mess of it on the day before. [Sidenote: A GARRULOUS PARISIAN PUBLISHER]