appearing in all imaginable and unimaginable guises and disguises, was pork.  Fowl was all skin and bones, fish dry and tasteless, sugar of so bad a quality that it made them sick, and butter could not be procured at all.  Indeed, they found it difficult to get anything of any kind.  On account of their non-attendance at church they were disliked by the villagers of Valdemosa, who sold their produce to such heretics only at twice or thrice the usual price.  Still, thanks to the good offices of the French consul’s cook, they might have done fairly well had not wet weather been against them.  But, alas, their eagerly-awaited provisions often arrived spoiled with rain, oftener still they did not arrive at all.  Many a time they had to eat bread as hard as ship-biscuits, and content themselves with real Carthusian dinners.  The wine was good and cheap, but, unfortunately, it had the objectionable quality of being heady.

These discomforts and wants were not painfully felt by George Sand and her children, nay, they gave, for a time at least, a new zest to life.  It was otherwise with Chopin.  “With his feeling for details and the wants of a refined well-being, he naturally took an intense dislike to Majorca after a few days of illness.”  We have already seen what a bad effect the wet weather and the damp of Son-Vent had on Chopin’s health.  But, according to George Sand, [footnote:  “Un Hiver a Marjorque,” pp. 161-168.  I suspect that she mixes up matters in a very unhistorical manner; I have, however, no means of checking her statements, her and her companion’s letters being insufficient for the purpose.  Chopin certainly was not likely to tell his friend the worst about his health.] it was not till later, although still in the early days of their sojourn in Majorca, that his disease declared itself in a really alarming manner.  The cause of this change for the worse was over-fatigue incurred on an excursion which he made with his friends to a hermitage three miles [footnote:  George Sand does not say what kind of miles] distant from Valdemosa; the length and badness of the road alone would have been more than enough to exhaust his fund of strength, but in addition to these hardships they had, on returning, to encounter a violent wind which threw them down repeatedly.  Bronchitis, from which he had previously suffered, was now followed by a nervous excitement that produced several symptoms of laryngeal phthisis. [Footnote:  In the Histoire de ma Vie George Sand Bays:  “From the beginning of winter, which set in all at once with a diluvian rain, Chopin showed, suddenly also, all the symptoms of pulmonary affection.”] The physician, judging of the disease by the symptoms that presented themselves at the time of his visits, mistook its real nature, and prescribed bleeding, milk diet, &c.  Chopin felt instinctively that all this would be injurious to him, that bleeding would even be fatal.  George Sand, who was an experienced nurse, and whose