* * * * * I have not the pen of our friend Miss Edgeworth, who writes all the while she laughs, talks, eats and drinks, and I believe, though I do not pretend to be so far in the secret, all the time she sleeps, too. She has good luck in having a pen which walks at once so unweariedly and so well. SIR WALTER SCOTT: _Letter to Joanne Baillie_, in the former’s ‘Memoirs,’ by J. G. Lockhart. * * * * * What do you think is my employment out of doors, and what it has been this week past? My garden? No such elegant thing: but making a gutter, a sewer, and a pathway, in the street of Edgeworthstown; and I do declare I am as much interested about it as I ever was in writing anything in my life. We have never here yet found it necessary to have recourse to public contributions for the poor; but it is necessary to give some assistance to the laboring class, and I find that making the said gutter and pathway will employ twenty men for three weeks. MARIA EDGEWORTH: _Letter_, quoted in ‘A Study of Maria Edgeworth.’ * * * * * [Sidenote: The Edgeworth homestead in 1842.] Edgeworthstown was, and is, a large country mansion, to which additions have been from time to time made, but made judiciously. An avenue of venerable trees leads to it from the public road. It is distant about seven miles from the town of Longford. The only room I need specially refer to is the library: it belonged more peculiarly to Maria, although the general sitting-room of the family. It was the room in which she did nearly all her work; not only that which was to gratify and instruct the world, but that which, in a measure, regulated the household. It is by no means a stately, solitary room, but large, spacious, and lofty, well stored with books, and furnished with suggestive engravings. Seen through the window is the lawn, embellished by groups of trees. If you look at the oblong table in the centre, you will see the rallying-point of the family, who are usually around it, reading, writing, or working; while Miss Edgeworth, only anxious that the inmates of the house shall each do exactly as he or she pleases, sits in her own peculiar corner on the sofa: a pen given her by Sir Walter Scott while a guest at Edgeworthstown (in 1825) is placed before her on a little, quaint, unassuming table, constructed, and added to, for convenience. MR. AND MRS. S. C. HALL: ‘Book of Memories.’ * * * * * For a long time Miss Edgeworth used a little desk in this room, on which, two years before her father’s death, he inscribed the following words: [Sidenote: Maria’s desk.]