eal Sunday should be a day when we can store up good and beautiful
thoughts to refresh us during the week, a day when there is no
hurry, no urgent business to trouble us, a day when we have time to
rise above the sordid details of life and enjoy its beauties; so it
seems to me that those who are not obliged to work for their living
should do their part in the world by adding to its store of good and
wise thoughts, by cultivating the arts and raising the standard of
excellence in them, and by bringing to light truths which had been
forgotten, or which had been hidden from our forefathers.

Richard Edgeworth was eminently a practical man, impulsive, as we
learn from his imprudent marriage at nineteen, but with a strong
sense of duty. His mother, who was Welsh, brought him up in habits
of thrift and industry very unlike those of his ancestors, which he
records in the early pages of his Memoirs. His great-grandmother
seems to have been a woman of strong character and courage in spite
of her belief in fairies and her dread of them, for he writes that
'while she was living at Liscard, she was, on some sudden alarm,
obliged to go at night to a garret at the top of the house for some
gunpowder, which was kept there in a barrel. She was followed
upstairs by an ignorant servant girl, who carried a bit of candle
without a candlestick between her fingers. When Lady Edgeworth had
taken what gunpowder she wanted, had locked the door, and was
halfway downstairs again, she observed that the girl had not her
candle, and asked what she had done with it; the girl recollected,
and answered that she had left it "stuck in the barrel of black
salt." Lady Edgeworth bid her stand still, and instantly returned by
herself to the room where the gunpowder was, found the candle as the
girl had described, put her hand carefully underneath it, carried it
safely out, and when she got to the bottom of the stairs dropped on
her knees, and thanked God for their deliverance'

When we remember that it was Richard Edgeworth, the father of Maria,
who trained and encouraged her first efforts in literature, we feel
that we owe him a debt of gratitude; but our interest is increased
when we read his Memoirs, for we then find ourselves brought into
close contact with a very intelligent and vigorous mind, keen to
take part in the scientific experiments of the day, while his
upright moral character and earnest and well-directed efforts to
improve his Irish propert