When he came back from France, cruel Elizabeth laughed in his face, and said she had liked him best as he was before. Notwithstanding all these unsuccessful attempts, Mr. Day found a wife at length. She was a lady of large fortune, which, of course, he “despised” and appropriated. She conformed to all her husband’s whims, and honestly believed him to be the best and most distinguished of men. “That’s what a man wants in a wife mostly,” as Mrs. Poyser says; “one who’d pretend she didn’t know which end she stood uppermost till her husband told her.” Mr. Day fell a victim at last to one of his numerous theories. He disapproved of the professional method of breaking in colts, and undertook to train one upon an improved plan of his own. The animal plunged violently and threw him; he had concussion of the brain, and died a few minutes after his fall. Poor Mrs. Day was so inconsolable that she took to her bed, and died two years later. She must have been a woman of the type of Milton’s Eve: “Herself, though fairest, unsupported flower.” When her prop was gone, she drooped and died. During Mr. Edgeworth’s residence at Lyons his first wife, Maria’s mother, died, and in a few months he married the beautiful Honora Sneyd. The social circle at Lichfield, in which Honora had lived before her marriage, contained many distinguished persons, among them Dr. Darwin, and Miss Anna Seward, the poetess. Honora herself had been engaged, or partly engaged, to Major André, the unfortunate officer whose execution as a spy by the Americans, during the War of Independence, caused such deep indignation in England. Her marriage to Mr. Edgeworth in 1773, and her death in 1780, took place before the melancholy end of Major André’s life. The association of Honora’s name with that of Major André is mentioned here as an illustration of the way in which the Edgeworth family were connected, in some form or another, with many of the most interesting events of the times in which they lived. Another such incident is to be found in the fact that the Abbé Edgeworth, a relative who had become a Roman Catholic priest, and had lived many years in France, attended Louis XVI upon the scaffold, and received his last words.