’"Yes.”

’"You know that, before He made the world, His Spirit brooded over the vast deep, which was a great sea without shores, and without bottom.  Then He made this world out of earth.”

’"Where did He find the earth ?” asked the boy.

’"At the bottom of the sea,” replied Father Jerome.

‘"But,” said the boy, “you told me just now that the sea had no bottom!"’

The Superior of the College des Oratoires concluded, ’You may, sir, I think, be secure that your son, when capable of making such a reply, is in no great danger of becoming a Catholic from the lectures of such profound teachers as these.’

This son, having no turn for scholarship, ultimately went to sea, a life which his hardihood and fearlessness of danger peculiarly fitted him for.  Some years afterwards he married an American lady and settled in South Carolina.

It was, perhaps, a failure in this first experiment in education which made Edgeworth devote so much care to the training of his younger children.

CHAPTER 4

After six years of happiness Honora’s health gave way, and consumption set in; some months of anxious nursing followed before she died, to the great grief of her husband.  She left several children, and her dying wish was that he should marry her sister Elizabeth.

Mr. Edgeworth was, at first, benumbed by grief, and unable to take an interest in his former pursuits; but in the society of his wife’s family he gradually recovered cheerfulness, and began to consider his wife’s dying advice to marry her sister.  He remarks:  ’Nothing is more erroneous than the common belief, that a man who has lived in the greatest happiness with one wife will be the most averse to take another.  On the contrary, the loss of happiness, which he feels when he loses her, necessarily urges him to endeavour to be again placed in a situation which has constituted his former felicity.

’I felt that Honora had judged wisely, and from a thorough knowledge of my character, when she had advised me to marry again.’

After these observations it is not surprising to hear that Edgeworth became engaged to Elizabeth Sneyd in the autumn of 1780.  They were staying for the marriage at Brereton Hall in Cheshire, and their banns were published in the parish church; but on the very morning appointed for the marriage, the clergyman received a letter which roused so many scruples in his mind as to make Edgeworth think it cruel to press him to perform the ceremony.  The Rector of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, was less scrupulous, and they were married there on Christmas Day 1780.

The following summer Mr. and Mrs. Edgeworth rented Davenport Hall in Cheshire, where they lived a quiet retired life, spending a good deal of their time with their friends Sir Charles and Lady Holte at Brereton.  Edgeworth amused himself by making a clock for the steeple at Brereton, and a chronometer of a singular construction, which, he says,’I intended to present to the King ... to add to His Majesty’s collection of uncommon clocks and watches which I had seen at St. James’s.’