II

When Messrs. Macmillan asked me to write a preface to this new edition of Miss Edgeworth’s stories I thought I should like to see the place where she had lived so long and where she had written so much, and so it happened that being in Ireland early this year, my daughter and I found ourselves driving up to Broadstone Station one morning in time for the early train to Edgeworthstown.  As we got out of our cab we asked the driver what the fare should be.  ‘Sure the fare is half a crown,’ said he, ‘and if you wish to give me more, I could keep it for myself!’

The train was starting and we bought our papers to beguile the road.  ‘Will you have a Home Rule paper or one of them others?’ said the newsboy, with such a droll emphasis that we couldn’t help laughing.  ‘Give me one of each,’ said I; then he laughed, as no English newsboy would have done. . . .  We went along in the car with a sad couple of people out of a hospital, compatriots of our own, who had been settled ten years in Ireland, and were longing to be away.  The poor things were past consolation, dull, despairing, ingrained English, sick and suffering and yearning for Brixton, just as other aliens long for their native hills and moors.  We travelled along together all that spring morning by the blossoming hedges, and triumphal arches of flowering May; the hills were very far away, but the lovely lights and scents were all about and made our journey charming.  Maynooth was a fragrant vision as we flew past, of vast gardens wall-enclosed, of stately buildings.  The whole line of railway was sweet with the May flowers, and with the pungent and refreshing scent of the turf-bogs.  The air was so clear and so limpid that we could see for miles, and short-sighted eyes needed no glasses to admire with.  Here and there a turf cabin, now and then a lake placidly reflecting the sky.  The country seemed given over to silence, the light sped unheeded across the delicate browns and greens of the bog-fields; or lay on the sweet wonderful green of the meadows.  One dazzling field we saw full of dancing circles of little fairy pigs with curly tails.  Everything was homelike but not England, there was something of France, something of Italy in the sky; in the fanciful tints upon the land and sea, in the vastness of the picture, in the happy sadness and calm content which is so difficult to describe or to account for.  Finally we reached our journey’s end.  It gave one a real emotion to see Edgeworthstown written up on the board before us, and to realise that we were following in the steps of those giants who had passed before us.  The master of Edgeworthstown kindly met us and drove us to his home through the outlying village, shaded with its sycamores, underneath which pretty cows were browsing the grass.  We passed the Roman Catholic Church, the great iron crucifix standing in the churchyard.  Then the horses turned in at the gate of the park, and there rose the old home, so exactly like what one expected it, that I felt as if I had been there before in some other phase of existence.