tact to fall in with his wishes, and a wifely devotion which made up to her for their seclusion from general society.  In her widowhood she found Mr. Edgeworth a most faithful and helpful friend; he offered to come over and aid in the search which was made at Mr. Day’s death for a large sum of money which was not forthcoming, and which it was thought he might, after his eccentric fashion, have concealed; as he took this measure when, ’at the time of the American War, he had apprehended that there would have been a national bankruptcy, and under this dread he had sold out of the Stocks. ...  A very considerable sum had been buried under the floor of the study in his mother’s house.  This he afterwards took up, and placed again in the public funds at the return of peace.’

Mr. Day had, before his marriage, promised to leave his library to his friend Edgeworth, but no mention was made of this in the will; he left almost everything to Mrs. Day.  She, however, hearing of Mr. Day’s promise, offered his library to his friend; but Edgeworth, in the same generous spirit, refused it, and Mrs. Day then wrote to him as follows: 

’My dear Mr. Edgeworth,—­I will ingenuously own, that of all the bequests Mr. Day could have made, the leaving his whole library from me would have mortified me the most—­indeed, more than if he had disposed of all his other property, and left me only that.  My ideas of him are so much associated with his books, that to part with them would be, as it were, breaking some of the last ties which still connect me with so beloved an object.  The being in the midst of books he has been accustomed to read, and which contain his marks and notes, will still give him a sort of existence with me.  Unintelligible as such fond chimeras may appear to many people, I am persuaded they are not so to you.’

Maria Edgeworth adds:  ’Generous people understand each other.  Mrs Day, of a noble disposition herself, always distinguished in my father the same generosity of disposition.  She had, she said, ever considered him as “the most purely disinterested and proudly independent of Mr. Day’s friends."’

Edgeworth was a devoted father; and the loss of his daughter Honora, a gifted girl of fifteen, was a great blow to him.  She was the child of his beloved wife Honora, and he had taken great pleasure in guiding her studies and watching the development of her character.  Ever since he had settled in his Irish home one of Edgeworth’s chief interests had been the education of his large family; Maria records with pride that at the age of seven Honora was able to answer the following questions: 

’If a line move its own length through the air so as to produce a surface, what figure will it describe?’

She answered, ’A square!

She was then asked: 

’If that square be moved downwards or upwards in the air the space of the length of one of its own sides, what figure will it, at the end of its motion, have described in the air?’