not bring back the past as do the books which belong to it. Storied
urns are in churches and stone niches, far removed from the lives of
which they speak; books seem a part of our daily life, and are like the
sound of a voice just outside the door. Here they were, as they had
been read by her, stored away by her hands, and still safely preserved,
bringing back the past with, as it were, a cheerful encouraging greeting
to the present. Other relics there are of course, but, as I say, none
which touch one so vividly. There is her silver ink-stand, the little
table her father left her on which she wrote (it had belonged to his
mother before him). There is also a curious trophy--a table which was
sent to her from Edinburgh, ornamented by promiscuous views of Italy,
curiously inappropriate to her genius; but not so the inscription, which
is quoted from Sir Walter Scott's Preface to his Collected Edition, and
which may as well be quoted here: 'WITHOUT BEING SO PRESUMPTUOUS AS TO
HOPE TO EMULATE THE RICH HUMOUR, THE PATHETIC TENDERNESS, AND ADMIRABLE
TRUTH WHICH PERVADE THE WORKS OF MY ACCOMPLISHED FRIEND,' Sir Walter
wrote, I FELT THAT SOMETHING MIGHT BE ATTEMPTED FOR MY OWN COUNTRY OF
THE SAME KIND AS THAT WHICH MISS EDGEWORTH SO FORTUNATELY ACHIEVED FOR
IRELAND.'

In the MEMOIRS of Miss Edgeworth there is a pretty account of her sudden
burst of feeling when this passage so unexpected, and so deeply felt by
her, was read out by one of her sisters, at a time when Maria lay weak
and recovering from illness in Edgeworthstown.

Our host took us that day, among other pleasant things, for a marvellous
and delightful flight on a jaunting car, to see something of the
country. We sped through storms and sunshine, by open moors and fields,
and then by villages and little churches, by farms where the pigs were
standing at the doors to be fed, by pretty trim cottages. The lights
came and went; as the mist lifted we could see the exquisite colours,
the green, the dazzling sweet lights on the meadows, playing upon the
meadow-sweet and elder bushes; at last we came to the lovely glades of
Carriglass. It seemed to me that we had reached an enchanted forest amid
this green sweet tangle of ivy, of flowering summer trees, of immemorial
oaks and sycamores.

A squirrel was darting up the branches of a beautiful spreading
beech-tree, a whole army of rabbits were flashing with silver tails into
the brushwood; swallows, blackbirds, peacock-butter