"The other evening," he writes to Rohde, "on returning home I found a letter addressed to me, a very short note: 'If you would care to meet Richard Wagner come to the Café zum Theater at a quarter to four.--W. ... SCH.' The news, if you will forgive me, positively turned my head, and I found myself as if tossed about by a whirlwind. It goes without saying that I went out at once to seek the excellent Windisch, who was able to give me some further information. He told me that Wagner was at Leipsic, at his sister's, in the strictest incognito; that the Press knew nothing about his visit, and that all the servants in the Brockhaus household were as mute as liveried gravediggers. Madame Brockhaus, Wagner's sister, had presented to him only one visitor, Madame Ritschl, whose judgment and penetration of mind you know, thus allowing herself the pleasure of being proud of her friend before her brother and proud of her brother before her friend, the happy creature! While Madame Ritschl was in the room Wagner played the _Lied_ from the _Meistersinger,_ which you know well; and the excellent lady informed him that the music was already familiar to her, _mea opera._ Thereupon pleasure and surprise on the part of Wagner: he expresses a keen desire to meet me incognito. They decide to invite me for Friday evening. Windisch explains that that day is impossible to me on account of my duties, my work, my engagements: and Sunday afternoon is suggested. We went to the house, Windisch and I, and found the professor's family there, but not Richard: he had gone out with his vast skull hidden under some prodigious headdress. I was presented to this very distinguished family, and received a most cordial invitation for Sunday evening, which I accepted. "I spent the next few days, I assure you, in a highly romantic mood: and you must admit that this _début,_ this unapproachable hero, have something about them bordering on the world of legend.