Tender as her heart was, Miss Owenson had something else to do than to indulge its weaknesses. She determined, as soon as she became acquainted with the real state of her father’s affairs, to earn her own livelihood; and however ridiculous her vanity may be, however gross her many breaches of truth and common propriety, we are bound to acknowledge, and we do it with hearty goodwill, that she went gallantly through with that purpose. Her first impulse was to turn authoress; her next and wiser, to go out as a governess or companion, if any lady, young or old, would have her. She was now about twenty-one, but looked considerably younger. There was difficulty, therefore, in finding a place for her, though her old music-master, M. Fontaine, did his best to make her merits known, and the Countess O’Haggerty, an _emigrée_ and a distinguished harpist, took her up. Accident, however, introduced her at one of Fontaine’s parties to Mrs Lefanu, a sister of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who behaved to her then and ever afterwards with marked kindness. The result was, that a Mrs Featherstone sought her out, and, after a little preliminary negotiation, it was settled that she should proceed on a visit to Bracklin, near Castletown, in the county of Westmeath, and, if approved and approving, that she should undertake the education of two young ladies, the daughters of her new friend. If we are to believe Lady Morgan, she seems to have won the hearts and clouded the judgments of all whom she approached. Her account of her journey to Bracklin, and of the manner of her reception there, is of course too good to be quite true, but it is very characteristic. She was to travel by the night-mail, but, being invited to a _petit bal d’adieu_ at M. Fontaine’s, she was startled in the middle of a country-dance by hearing the guard’s horn sounding at the end of the street. “Then all that could be done was for Molly to throw a warm cloak over me, with my own bonnet, and my little bundle of things, so that I might dress when I got to Kinigad. One of the young gentlemen snatched up my portmanteau, and so we all flew along the flags, which were frosted over, and got to the mail just as the guard lost patience and was mounting. So I was poked in and the door banged to, and ‘my carriage’ drove off like lightning down College Green, along the quays, and then into some gloomy street I did not remember.”