there.  It contains, as letters from watering-places usually do, criticisms of the society and accounts of promenadings, excursions, regular meals, and early hours in going to bed and in rising.  As the greater part of the contents can be of no interest to us, I shall confine myself to picking up what seems to me worth preserving.  He had been drinking whey and the waters for a fortnight and found he was getting somewhat stouter and at the same time lazy.  People said he began to look better.  He enjoyed the sight of the valleys from the hills which surround Reinerz, but the climbing fatigued him, and he had sometimes to drag himself down on all-fours.  One mountain, the rocky Heuscheuer, he and other delicate persons were forbidden to ascend, as the doctor was afraid that the sharp air at the top would do his patients harm.  Of course, Frederick tried to make fun of everything and everyone—­for instance, of the wretched wind-band, which consisted of about a dozen “caricatures,” among whom a lean bassoon-player with a snuffy hook-nose was the most notable.  To the manners of the country, which in some respects seem to have displeased him, he got gradually accustomed.

At first I was astonished that in Silesia the women work generally more than the men, but as I am doing nothing myself just now I have no difficulty in falling in with this arrangement.

During his stay at Reinerz he gave also a concert on behalf of two orphans who had come with their sick mother to this watering-place, and at her death were left so poor as to be unable even to pay the funeral expenses and to return home with the servant who took care of them.

From Reinerz Frederick went to Strzyzewo, the property of Madame Wiesiolowska, his godmother, and sister of his godfather, Count Frederick Skarbek.  While he was spending here the rest of his holidays, he took advantage of an invitation he had received from Prince Radziwill (governor of the grand duchy of Posen, and, through his wife, a daughter of Prince Ferdinand, related to the royal family of Prussia) to visit him at his country-seat Antonin, which was not very far from Strzyzewo.  The Prince, who had many relations in Poland, and paid frequent visits to that country, must on these occasions have heard of and met with the musical prodigy that was the pet of the aristocracy.  Moreover, it is on record that he was present at the concert at Warsaw in 1825 at which Frederick played.  We have already considered and disposed of the question whether the Prince, as has been averred by Liszt, paid for young Chopin’s education.  As a dilettante Prince Radziwill occupied a no less exalted position in art and science than as a citizen and functionary in the body politic.  To confine ourselves to music, he was not only a good singer and violoncellist, but also a composer; and in composition he did not confine himself to songs, duets, part-songs, and the like, but undertook the ambitious and arduous task