thing especially amusing to relate, the letter is always addressed to her. In 1824 Miss Edgeworth lost her sister, Mrs. Beddoes. A few months before, Sophy was married to a Captain Fox. She was grieved to lose this sister, and the marriage affected her deeply.
Though Miss Edgeworth was now past fifty, she showed neither bodily nor mental signs of advancing years. Indeed, mentally she was as fresh and as young as ever, and her letters reflect the same pleasure in life and all it offers that they evinced throughout. Only on New Year's Day, which was also her birthday, does she indulge in any reflections concerning the flight of time. Here is a letter written in 1825:—
A happy new year to you, my dearest aunt, to you to whom I now look as much as I can to anyone now living, for the rays of pleasure that I expect to gild my bright evening of life. As we advance in life we become more curious, more fastidious in gilding and gilders; we find, to our cost, that all that glitters is not gold, and your every-day bungling carvers and gilders will not do. Our evening gilders must be more skilful than those who flashed and daubed away in the morning of life, and gilt with any tinsel, the weathercock for the morning sun. You may perceive, my dear aunt, by my having got so finely to the weathercock, and the rising sun, that I am out of the hands of all my dear apothecaries, and playing away again with a superfluity of life. (N.B. I am surprisingly prudent.) Honora's cough has almost subsided, and Lucy can sit upright the greater part of the day. "God bless the mark!" as Molly Bristow would say, if she heard me, "don't be bragging."
Not many days later, when her step-mother and some friends, "poor souls and full-dressed bodies," had gone out to dinner, she penned another long letter to the same correspondent, a letter delightfully fresh in tone and full of her personality:—
