shadow, watching us go by; strange old women, with draperies round their heads, were coming out of their houses.  We passed the Post-Office, the village shops, with their names, the Monaghans and Gerahtys, such as we find again in Miss Edgeworth’s novels.  We heard the local politics discussed over the counter with a certain aptness and directness which struck me very much.  We passed the boarding-house, which was not without its history—­a long low building erected by Mr. and Miss Edgeworth for a school, where the Sandfords and Mertons of those days were to be brought up together:  a sort of foreshadowing of the High Schools of the present.  Mr. Edgeworth was, as we know, the very spirit of progress, though his experiment did not answer at the time.  At the end of the village street, where two roads divide, we noticed a gap in the decent roadway—­a pile of ruins in a garden.  A tumble-down cottage, and beyond the cottage, a falling shed, on the thatched roof of which a hen was clucking and scraping.  These cottages Mr. Edgeworth had, after long difficulty, bought up and condemned as unfit for human habitation.  The plans had been considered, the orders given to build new cottages in their place, which were to be let to the old tenants at the old rent, but the last remaining inhabitant absolutely refused to leave; we saw an old woman in a hood slowly crossing the road, and carrying a pail for water; no threats or inducements would move her, not even the sight of a neat little house, white-washed and painted, and all ready for her to step into.  Her present rent was 10d. a week, Mr. Edgeworth told me, and she had been letting the tumble-down shed to a large family for 1s. 4d.  This sub-let was forcibly put an end to, but the landlady still stops there, and there she will stay until the roof tumbles down upon her head.  The old creature passed on through the sunshine, a decrepit, picturesque figure carrying her pail to the stream, defying all the laws of progress and political economy and civilisation in her feebleness and determination.

Most of the women came to their doors to see us go by.  They all looked as old as the hills—­some dropt curtseys, others threw up their arms in benediction.  From a cottage farther up the road issued a strange, shy old creature, looking like a bundle of hay, walking on bare legs.  She came up with a pinch of snuff, and a shake of the hand; she was of the family of the man who had once saved Edgeworthstown from being destroyed by the rebels.  ‘Sure it was not her father,’ said old Peggy,’ it was her grandfather did it!’ So she explained, but it was hard to believe that such an old, old creature had ever had a grandfather in the memory of man.