d
creature passed on through the sunshine, a decrepit, picturesque figure
carrying her pail to the stream, defying all the laws of progress and
political economy and civilisation in her feebleness and determination.

Most of the women came to their doors to see us go by. They all looked
as old as the hills--some dropt curtseys, others threw up their arms in
benediction. From a cottage farther up the road issued a strange, shy
old creature, looking like a bundle of hay, walking on bare legs. She
came up with a pinch of snuff, and a shake of the hand; she was of the
family of the man who had once saved Edgeworthstown from being destroyed
by the rebels. 'Sure it was not her father,' said old Peggy,' it was her
grandfather did it!' So she explained, but it was hard to believe that
such an old, old creature had ever had a grandfather in the memory of
man.

The glebe lands lie beyond the village. They reach as far as the church
on its high plateau, from which you can see the Wicklow Hills on a fine
day, and the lovely shifting of the lights of the landscape. The remains
of the great pew of the Edgeworth family, with its carved canopy of
wood, is still a feature in the bare church from which so much has been
swept away. The names of the fathers are written on the chancel walls,
and a few medallions of daughters and sisters also. In the churchyard,
among green elder bushes and tall upspringing grasses, is the square
monument erected to Mr. Edgeworth and his family; and as we stood there
the quiet place was crossed and recrossed by swallows with their beating
crescent wings.

III

Whatever one may think of Mr. Edgeworth's literary manipulations and of
his influence upon his daughter's writings, one cannot but respect the
sincere and cordial understanding which bound these two people together,
and realise the added interest in life, in its machinery and evolutions,
which Maria owed to her father's active intelligence. Her own gift, I
think, must have been one for perceiving through the minds of others,
and for realising the value of what they in turn reflected; one is
struck again and again by the odd mixture of intuition, and of absolute
matter of fact which one finds in her writings.

It is difficult to realise, when one reads the memoirs of human beings
who loved and hated, and laughed and scolded, and wanted things and did
without them, very much as we do ourselves, that though they thought as
we do and felt as we do