Then there are the usual anecdotes—­one is tempted to call them the stock stories of the boyhood of any great composer.  In infancy Chopin could not hear music without crying.  Mozart was morbidly sensitive to the tones of a trumpet.  Later the Polish lad sported familiarly with his talents, for he is related to have sent to sleep and awakened a party of unruly boys at his father’s school.  Another story is his fooling of a Jew merchant.  He had high spirits, perhaps too high, for his slender physique.  He was a facile mimic, and Liszt, Balzac, Bocage, Sand and others believed that he would have made an actor of ability.  With his sister Emilia he wrote a little comedy.  Altogether he was a clever, if not a brilliant lad.  His letters show that he was not the latter, for while they are lively they do not reveal much literary ability.  But their writer saw with open eyes, eyes that were disposed to caricature the peculiarities of others.  This trait, much clarified and spiritualized in later life, became a distinct, ironic note in his character.  Possibly it attracted Heine, although his irony was on a more intellectual plane.

His piano playing at this time was neat and finished, and he had already begun those experimentings in technique and tone that afterward revolutionized the world of music and the keyboard.  He being sickly and his sister’s health poor, the pair was sent in 1826 to Reinerz, a watering place in Prussian Silesia.  This with a visit to his godmother, a titled lady named Wiesiolowska and a sister of Count Frederic Skarbek,—­the name does not tally with the one given heretofore, as noted by Janotha,—­consumed this year.  In 1827 he left his regular studies at the Lyceum and devoted his time to music.  He was much in the country, listening to the fiddling and singing of the peasants, thus laying the corner stone of his art as a national composer.  In the fall of 1828 he went to Berlin, and this trip gave him a foretaste of the outer world.

Stephen Heller, who saw Chopin in 1830, described him as pale, of delicate health, and not destined, so they said in Warsaw, for a long life.  This must have been during one of his depressed periods, for his stay in Berlin gives a record of unclouded spirits.  However, his sister Emilia died young of pulmonary trouble and doubtless Frederic was predisposed to lung complaint.  He was constantly admonished by his relatives to keep his coat closed.  Perhaps, as in Wagner’s case, the uncontrollable gayety and hectic humors were but so many signs of a fatal disintegrating process.  Wagner outlived them until the Scriptural age, but Chopin succumbed when grief, disappointment and intense feeling had undermined him.  For the dissipations of the “average sensual man” he had an abiding contempt.  He never smoked, in fact disliked it.  His friend Sand differed greatly in this respect, and one of the saddest anecdotes related by De Lenz accuses her of calling for a match to light her cigar:  “Frederic,