friend go, for so much it detaches one from life; yet
it still more makes us value the friends we have left. And
continually, at every fresh blow, I really _wonder_, and am
thankful, most truly thankful, that I have so many, so much left.

A young sister who had ailed for years, and was obliged to lie flat on a
couch, was a constant source of solicitude. What could be done to divert
her, to comfort her, or alleviate her sufferings, was always in Miss
Edgeworth's mind. Lucy's name often occurs in her letters, and whenever
she is absent and there is anything especially amusing to relate, the
letter is always addressed to her. In 1824 Miss Edgeworth lost her
sister, Mrs. Beddoes. A few months before, Sophy was married to a
Captain Fox. She was grieved to lose this sister and the marriage
affected her deeply.

Though Miss Edgeworth was now past fifty, she showed neither bodily nor
mental signs of advancing years. Indeed, mentally she was as fresh and
as young as ever, and her letters reflect the same pleasure in life and
all it offers that they evinced throughout. Only on New Year's day,
which was also her birthday, does she indulge in any reflections
concerning the flight of time. Here is a letter written in 1825:--

A happy new year to you, my dearest aunt, to you to whom I now
look, as much as I can to any one now living, for the rays of
pleasure that I expect to gild my bright evening of life. As we
advance in life, we become more curious, more fastidious in gilding
and gilders. We find to our cost that all that glitters is not
gold, and your every-day bungling carvers and gilders will not do.
Our evening gilders must be more skillful than those who flashed
and daubed away in the morning of life, and gilt with any tinsel
the weathercock for the morning sun. You may perceive, my dear
aunt, by my having got so finely to the weathercock and the rising
sun, that I am out of the hands of my dear apothecaries, and
playing away again with a superfluity of life. (N. B.--I am
surprisingly prudent.) Honora's cough has almost subsided, and
Lucy can sit upright the greater part of the day. "God bless the
mark!" as Molly Bristow would say, if she heard me; "don't be
bragging."

Not many days later, when her stepmother and some friends, "poor souls
and full-dress bodies," had gone out to dinner, she penned another long
letter to the sa