In the speech he made at the Chopin centenary, he advanced an interesting theory to explain the genius of his country and the unrest and moodiness of the Poles. He believes that, as a nation, they are like their music, and live in a perpetual state of _tempo rubato_, caused by a physical defect--arrhythmia, or unevenness of heartbeat. He was not in the best of health; and being unable to play at this festival, he offered that honor to his American pupil and friend Ernest Schelling, who passed through the ordeal triumphantly, satisfying not only his Polish audience, but his sponsor by his interpretation of the works of Poland’s idol, Chopin. Paderewski is not addicted to talking much about himself; but occasionally he gives his friends a glimpse of the real man. One autobiographic incident concerns his own playing. Berlin has always been unjust to Paderewski, not for artistic reasons, but on political grounds. One well-known critic, after hearing Paderewski play, went to the artist’s room, his eyes filled with tears of joy, to congratulate the master; but later, obeying the official _mot d’ordre_ which is frequently used in the attempt to kill great artists, he wrote most disagreeably about Paderewski, who, in relating the experience, added half deprecatingly: “He spoiled me by his call. It is easy to be spoiled; and he was so pleased the first time that I thought he would come again.” The remarkable songs to the poems of Catulle Mendès, which Paderewski published a few years ago, were written, he told us, in three weeks; and in that year, produced in an incredibly short space of time, the piano sonata and the sketch of the symphony also saw the light. The scoring of the latter he could not finish until three years later. The composer is very particular about his manuscript, and if he makes an error, he rewrites the whole page. At times he could score only one page; at others, as many as five; and he smilingly says, “I was so proud of my five pages, even if they were all rests.” He himself has to study the piano accompaniments to his later songs, and he says that “it is foolish to make them so difficult.” His South-American experiences had been of great interest to him both from the point of view of the artist and that of the observer. He had played ten times in Buenos Aires to growing houses and increasing enthusiasm, the last of the series being to a $12,000 audience; he had tasted barbecued beef at a great plantation feast, and found it very unpalatable; he had studied the agricultural conditions of the South-American countries, and had been amazed at the natural wealth of the Argentine Republic, at its forests of trees unknown to us, and still more at its humus, forty meters deep, which makes a soil so fertile that it will last for centuries with no enriching. Being a practical farmer himself, and deeply interested in the good of his own land and forests, every detail of this extraordinary wealth fascinated the great pianist.