were the piles of Magazines that had been sent from America.  I never knew before how many Magazines existed even those early days; we took some down at hazard and read names, dates, and initials. . . .  Storied urn and monumental bust do 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-butterflies, dragonflies on the wing, a mighty sylvan life was roaming in this lovely orderly wilderness.