ace of skulls for
kings and such riffraff who have polluted this fair world with their
boastings of a divine power.

The struggle of Poland to free herself from the grip of the imperial
succubi has generated an atmosphere of ultramarine, so we view the
little land of patriots (and fanatics) through a mist of melancholy.
The history of Poland is written in blood and tears.

Go ask John Sobieski, who saw his father hanged by order of Ferdinand
Maximilian, and child though he was, realized that banishment was the
fate of himself and mother; and then ten years after, himself, stood
death-guard over this same Maximilian in Mexico, and told that tyrant
the story of his life, and shook hands with him, calling it quits, ere
the bandage was tied over the eyes of the ex-dictator and the sunlight
shut out forever.

Go ask John Sobieski!

The woes of Poland have produced strange men. Under such rule as she has
known relentless hate springs up in otherwise gracious hearts from the
scattered dragons' teeth; and in other natures, where there is not quite
so much of the motive temperament, a deep strain of sorrow and religious
melancholy finds expression. The exquisite sensibility, delicate
insight, proud reserve and brooding world-sorrow of Frederic Chopin were
the inheritance of mother to son. This mother's mind was saturated with
the wrongs her people had endured: she herself had suffered every
contumely, for where chance had caused fact to falter, imagination had
filled the void.

It is easy to say that Chopin's was an abnormal nature, and of course it
was, but when disease divides this world from another only by the
thinnest veil, the mind has been known to see things with a clearness
and vividness never before attained. With Chopin the strands of life
were often taut to the breaking-point, but ere they snapped, their
vibration gave forth to us some exquisite harmonies.

Curiously enough, this power to see and do is often the possession of
dying men. The life flares up in a flame before it goes out forever. The
passion of the consumptive Camille, as portrayed by Dumas, is
typical--no healthy woman ever loved with that same intense, eager and
almost vindictive desire. It was a race with Death.

Perfect health brings unconsciousness of body, and disease that almost
relieves the spirit of this weight of flesh produces the same results.
Again we have the Law of Antithesis.

That such a youth as Frederic Chopin should seek in