The people here are ugly, but, it would seem, good.  As a compensation there are charming, apparently mischievous, cattle, perfect milk, butter, eggs, and tout ce qui s’en suit, cheese and chickens.

To save the reader from becoming confused by allusions in Chopin’s letters to names of unknown persons and places, I will now say a few words about the composer’s Scotch friends.  The Stirlings of Keir, generally regarded as the principal family of the name, are said to be descended from Walter de Striveline, Strivelyn, or Strivelyng, Lucas of Strivelyng (1370-1449) being the first possessor of Keyr.  The family was for about two centuries engaged in the East India and West India trade.  Archibald Stirling, the father of the late baronet, went, as William Fraser relates in The Stirlings of Keir, like former younger sons, to Jamaica, where he was a planter for nearly twenty-five years.  He succeeded his brother James in 1831, greatly improved the mansion, and died in 1847.  When Chopin visited Keir it was in the possession of William Stirling, who, in 1865, became Sir William Stirling-Maxwell (his mother was a daughter of Sir John Maxwell), and is well-known by his literary works—­Annals of the Artists of Spain (1848), The Cloister Life of the Emperor Charles V. (1852), Velasquez (1855), &c.  He was the uncle of Jane Stirling and Mrs. Erskine, daughters (the former the youngest daughter) of John Stirling, of Kippendavie and Kippenross, and friends of Chopin.  W. Hanna, the editor of the Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, says that Jane Stirling was a cousin and particular friend of Thomas Erskine.  The latter used in later life to regard her and the Duchess de Broglie as the most remarkable women he had ever met:—­

In her later years she lived much in Paris, and counted among her friends there Ary Scheffer.  In his “Christus Consolator,” this eminent artist has presented in one of the figures his ideal of female beauty, and was struck on being first introduced to Miss Stirling to find in her the almost exact embodiment of that ideal.  She was introduced afterwards in many of his pictures.

In a letter addressed to Mrs. Schwabe, and dated February 14, 1859, we read about her:—­

She was ill for eight weeks, and suffered a great deal...I know you will feel this deeply, for you could appreciate the purity and beauty of that stream of love which flowed through her whole life.  I don’t think that I ever knew anyone who seemed more entirely to have given up self, and devoted her whole being to the good of others.  I remember her birth like yesterday, and I never saw anything in her but what was lovable from the beginning to the end of her course.

Lindsay Sloper, who lived in Paris from 1841 to 1846, told me that Miss Stirling, who was likewise staying there, took for some time lessons from him.  As she wished to become a pupil of Chopin, he spoke to his master about her.  Chopin, Lindsay Sloper said, was pleased with her playing, and soon began to like her.