The ball is now at Miss Owenson’s foot, and she keeps it going. Her life at Bracklin is a sort of heaven upon earth. Everybody takes to her. Mr Featherstone himself, though reserved at the outset, becomes one of her thousand lovers, and carries her with him into all the society which the county can afford. So it is when the family goes to Dublin for the season. How the education of the Misses Featherstone got on at all, we don’t pretend to understand, for the teacher seems to have plunged into the very vortex of fashionable life. Among other acquaintances which she formed were Sir John Stevenson and Tom Moore, the latter of whom she did her best to captivate, with, as it would appear, only indifferent success. But if she failed to bring the poet to her feet, she caught from him the furor of authorship. She had already completed her first novel, and needed only a publisher to bring it out. Her account of the manner in which that want was supplied is too rich not to be given in detail:— “The Featherstone family were shortly to leave town, and I resolved on the desperate step of publishing my novel, though I did not know the difference between a bookseller and a publisher; and I intended to take my chance of finding one in the streets of Dublin. I had observed that the Domenich Street cook, a relic of the Dowager Steele regime, was in the habit of hanging up her bonnet and cloak in the back hall. I slipped down quietly one morning early, put on the cloak and bonnet, and with the MS. tidily put up under my arm, passed through the open hall-door, at which a milkman was standing, and started on my first literary adventure. I wandered down into Britain Street, past the noble edifices of the Lying-in Hospital and the Rotunda, quickened my steps down the aristocratic pavement of Sackville Street, then occupied by the principal nobility of Ireland. When I got to the bottom, with Carlisle Bridge and the whole world of commerce ‘all before me where to choose,’ I was puzzled; but as chance directed, I turned to the right into Henry Street, proceeding along, frightened and uncertain. To the left rose the Church of St. Peter, where I had gone to be confirmed; opposite to it were Stella’s lodgings, where she and Mrs Dingley held their _bureau d’esprit_. At the other end of the carrefoure, and on a line with the church, and on the same side with it, my eyes were dazzled by an inscription over a door,—‘T. Smith, printer and bookseller.’ As I ascended the steps a dirty-faced boy was sweeping the shop, and, either purposely or accidentally, swept all the dust into my face. He then flung down the brush, and, springing over the counter, leaned his elbows on the counter, and his chubby face on his hands, and said, ‘What do you please to want, Miss?’ I was stunned, but after a moment’s hesitation replied, the gentleman of the house. ‘Which of them—young or ould?’ Before I could make any