flies, dragonflies
on the wing, a mighty sylvan life was roaming in this lovely orderly
wilderness.

The great Irish kitchen garden, belonging to the house, with its seven
miles of wall, was also not unlike a part of a fairy tale. Its owner,
Mr. Lefroy, told me that Miss Edgeworth had been constantly there. She
was a great friend of Judge Lefroy. As a boy he remembered her driving
up to the house and running up through the great drawing-room doors to
greet the Judge.

Miss Edgeworth certainly lived in a fair surrounding, and, with Sophia
Western, must have gone along the way of life heralded by sweetest
things, by the song of birds, by the gold radiance of the buttercups, by
the varied shadows of those beautiful trees under which the cows gently
tread the grass. English does not seem exactly the language in which to
write of Ireland, with its sylvan wonders of natural beauty. Madame de
Sevigne's descriptions of her woods came to my mind. It is not a place
which delights one by its actual sensual beauty, as Italy does; it is
not as in England, where a thousand associations link one to every
scene and aspect--Ireland seems to me to contain some unique and most
impersonal charm, which is quite unwritable.

All that evening we sat talking with our hosts round the fire (for it
was cold enough for a fire), and I remembered that in Miss Edgeworth's
MEMOIRS it was described how the snow lay upon the ground and upon
the land, when the family came home in June to take possession of
Edgeworthstown.

As I put out my candle in the spacious guest-chamber I wondered which of
its past inhabitants I should wish to see standing in the middle of the
room. I must confess that the thought of the beautiful Honora filled
me with alarm, and if Miss Seward had walked in in her pearls and satin
robe I should have fled for my life. As I lay there experimentalising
upon my own emotions I found that after all, natural simple people do
not frighten one whether dead or alive. The thought of them is ever
welcome; it is the artificial people who are sometimes one thing,
sometimes another, and who form themselves on the weaknesses and fancies
of those among whom they live, who are really terrifying.

The shadow of the bird's wing flitted across the window of my bedroom,
and the sun was shining next morning when I awoke. I could see the cows,
foot deep in the grass under the hawthorns. After breakfast we went out
into the grounds and through an arc