written, and the present writer has written, and
various memoirs and letters have appeared in different magazines and
papers with allusions and descriptions all more or less interesting.
One can but admire the spirit which animated that whole existence; the
cheerful, kindly, multiplied interest Maria Edgeworth took in the
world outside, as well as in the wellbeing of all those around her.
Generations, changes, new families, new experiences, none of these
overwhelmed her. She seemed to move in a crowd, a cheerful, orderly
crowd, keeping in tune and heart with its thousand claims; with strength
and calmness of mind to bear multiplied sorrows and a variety of care
with courage, and an ever-reviving gift of spirited interest. Her
history is almost unique in its curious relationships; its changes of
step-mothers, its warm family ties, its grasp of certain facts which
belong to all time rather than to the hour itself. Miss Edgeworth lived
for over eighty years, busy, beneficent, modest, and intelligent to the
last. When she died she was mourned as unmarried women of eighty are not
often mourned.

The present owner of Edgeworthstown told us that he could just remember
her, lying dead upon her bed, and her face upon the pillow, and the
sorrowful tears of the household; and how he and the other little
children were carried off by a weeping aunt into the woods, to comfort
and distract them on the funeral day. He also told us of an incident
prior to this event which should not be overlooked. How he himself,
being caught red-handed, at the age of four or thereabouts, with his
hands in a box of sugar-plums, had immediately confessed the awful fact
that he had been about to eat them, and he was brought then and there
before his Aunt Maria for sentence. She at once decided that he had
behaved Nobly in speaking the truth, and that he must be rewarded
in kind for his praiseworthy conduct, and be allowed to keep the
sugar-plums!

This little story after half a century certainly gives one pleasure
still to recall, and proves, I think, that cakes may be enjoyed long
after they have been eaten, and also that there is a great deal to be
said for justice with lollipops in the scale. But what would Rosamond's
parents have thought of such a decision? One shudders to think of their
disapproval, or of that of dear impossible Mr. Thomas Day, with his
trials and experiments of melted sealing-wax upon little girls' bare
arms, and his glasses of t