On some alarm which caused the gentlemen of the family to take down their guns, she went to a dark loft at the top of the house to fetch some powder from a barrel that was there kept in store, taking a young maid-servant to carry the candle; which, as might be expected in an Irish household of the seventeenth century, was devoid of any candlestick. After taking the needful amount of gunpowder, Lady Edgeworth locked the door, and was halfway downstairs when she missed the candle, and asking the girl what she had done with it, received the cool answer that 'she had left it sticking in the barrel of black salt'. Lady Edgeworth bade her stand still, turned round, went back alone to the loft where the tallow candle stood guttering and flaring planted in the middle of the gunpowder, resolutely put an untrembling hand beneath it, took it out so steadily that no spark fell, carried it down, and when she came to the bottom of the stairs dropped on her knees, and broke forth in a thanksgiving aloud for the safety of the household in this frightful peril. This high-spirited lady lived to be ninety years old, and left a numerous family. One grandson was the Abbe Edgeworth, known in France as De Firmont, such being the alteration of Fairymount on French lips. It was he who, at the peril of his own life, attended Louis XVI. to the guillotine, and thus connected his name so closely with the royal cause that when his cousin Richard Lovell Edgeworth, of Edgeworths-town, visited France several years after, the presence of a person so called was deemed perilous to the rising power of Napoleon. This latter Mr. Edgeworth was the father of Maria, whose works we hope are well known to our young readers. The good Chevalier Bayard was wont to mourn over the introduction of firearms, as destructive of chivalry; and certainly the steel-clad knight, with barbed steed, and sword and lance, has disappeared from the battle-field; but his most essential qualities, truth, honor, faithfulness, mercy, and self-devotion, have not disappeared with him, nor can they as long as Christian men and women bear in mind that 'greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friend'. And that terrible compound, gunpowder, has been the occasion of many another daring deed, requiring desperate resolution, to save others at the expense of a death perhaps more frightful to the imagination than any other. Listen to a story of the King's birthday in Jersey 'sixty years since'--in 1804, when that 4th of June that Eton boys delight in, was already in the forty-fourth year of its observance in honor of the then reigning monarch, George III.