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 arched doorway into the kitchen garden.  It might have been some corner of Italy or the South of France; the square tower of the granary rose high against the blue, the gray walls were hung with messy fruit trees, pigeons were darting and flapping their wings, gardeners were at work, the very vegetables were growing luxuriant and romantic and edged by thick borders of violet pansy; crossing the courtyard, we came into the village street, also orderly and white-washed.  The soft limpid air made all things into pictures, into Turners, into Titians.  A Murillo-like boy, with dark eyes, was leaning against a wall, with his