than pleasing to their visitors.  The clicking of the castanets with which they accompany their festal processions, and which, unlike the broken and measured rhythm of the Spaniards, consists of a continuous roll like that of a drum “battant aux champs,” is from time to time suddenly interrupted in order to sing in unison a coplita on a phrase which always recommences but never finishes.  George Sand shares the opinion of M. Tastu that the principal Majorcan rhythms and favourite fioriture are Arabic in type and origin.

Of quite another nature was the music that might be heard in those winter months in one of the cells of the monastery of Valdemosa.  “With what poesy did his music fill this sanctuary, even in the midst of his most grievous troubles!” exclaims George Sand.  I like to picture to myself the vaulted cell, in which Pleyel’s piano sounded so magnificently, illumined by a lamp, the rich traceries of the Gothic chair shadowed on the wall, George Sand absorbed in her studies, her children at play, and Chopin pouring out his soul in music.

It would be a mistake to think that those months which the friends spent in Majorca were for them a time of unintermittent or even largely-predominating wretchedness.  Indeed, George Sand herself admits that, in spite of the wildness of the country and the pilfering habits of the people, their existence might have been an agreeable one in this romantic solitude had it not been for the sad spectacle of her companion’s sufferings and certain days of serious anxiety about his life.  And now I must quote a. long but very important passage from the “Histoire de ma Vie":—­

The poor great artist was a detestable patient.  What I had feared, but unfortunately not enough, happened.  He became completely demoralised.  Bearing pain courageously enough, he could not overcome the disquietude of his imagination.  The monastery was for him full of terrors and phantoms, even when he was well.  He did not say so, and I had to guess it.  On returning from my nocturnal explorations in the ruins with my children, I found him at ten o’clock at night before his piano, his face pale, his eyes wild, and his hair almost standing on end.  It was some moments before he could recognise us.

He then made an attempt to laugh, and played to us sublime things he had just composed, or rather, to be more accurate, terrible or heartrending ideas which had taken possession of him, as it were without his knowledge, in that hour of solitude, sadness, and terror.

It was there that he composed the most beautiful of those short pages he modestly entitled “Preludes.”  They are masterpieces.  Several present to the mind visions of deceased monks and the sounds of the funeral chants which beset his imagination; others are melancholy and sweet—­they occurred to him in the hours of sunshine and of health, with the noise of the children’s laughter under the window, the distant sound of