built a village market-house and a room for
the magistrate's petty sessions. Her generosity, both in giving money,
time and labor for others, was boundless; and her kindnesses were made
doubly kind by the thoughtfulness with which they were executed. Thus,
for example, many of her tenants and neighbors had relations or friends
who had emigrated to the United States. These poor people often found
that letters they wrote to America miscarried, a frequent reason being
of course insufficient or illegible addresses. To obviate this, Miss
Edgeworth caused them to send her all their letters, which she then
forwarded once a month. This labor often gave her no small trouble, but
she grudged neither this nor the time spent in making up the monthly
packet. Her poor neighbors, she deemed, repaid her only too richly by
their gratitude. She was certainly one of the few people who practice
what they preach; she exemplified in her own person all those judicious
plans and rules for helping the needy which she had brought forward in
her works. When it is further remembered that Miss Edgeworth retained
to the very last, until her eighty-second year, that faculty, which is
judged the exclusive gift of youth, of admitting new interests into her
life, and that she further made them to run side by side with those she
had held of yore, in this mode enriching and widening her mental and
emotional horizon, it is little wonder that her old age was one of
serene felicity.

The marriage of Fanny Edgeworth, Miss Edgeworth's favorite among all her
younger sisters, was a real grief to her for the moment, though, with
her usual unselfishness, she upbraided herself for feeling such a
"shameful, weak, selfish sorrow at parting with this darling child." A
pleasure of a very different kind came to her shortly after in the shape
of Sir Walter Scott's introduction to his collected _Waverley Novels_.
The sheets, while passing through the press, had been sent to her, and
she felt that Scott had, in the most delightful and kind manner, said
everything that could gratify her "as an author, friend and human
creature."

You might well say that I should be "ill to please"--you might have
said impossible to please--if what you sent me had not pleased,
gratified, delighted me to the top of my bent; saturated me head
and heart with the most grateful sense of the kindness of my most
admired friend, and with the unspeakable gratification of su