or he had brought from England was
not able to control his son, resolved to send young Richard to
school at Lyons. The Jesuits had lately been dismissed, but the
Peres de L'Oratoire had taken charge of their Seminary, and to them
Edgeworth resolved to intrust his son, having been first assured by
the Superior that he would not attempt to convert the boy, and would
forbid the under-masters to do so. A certain Pere Jerome, however,
desired to make the boy a good Catholic; and the Superior frankly
told Edgeworth the circumstance, saying,'One day he took your boy
between his knees, and began from the beginning of things to teach
him what he ought to believe. "My little man," said he, "did you
ever hear of God?"

'"Yes."

'"You know that, before He made the world, His Spirit brooded over
the vast deep, which was a great sea without shores, and without
bottom. Then He made this world out of earth."

'"Where did He find the earth ?" asked the boy.

'"At the bottom of the sea," replied Father Jerome.

'"But," said the boy, "you told me just now that the sea had no bottom!"'

The Superior of the College des Oratoires concluded, 'You may, sir,
I think, be secure that your son, when capable of making such a
reply, is in no great danger of becoming a Catholic from the
lectures of such profound teachers as these.'

This son, having no turn for scholarship, ultimately went to sea, a
life which his hardihood and fearlessness of danger peculiarly
fitted him for. Some years afterwards he married an American lady
and settled in South Carolina.

It was, perhaps, a failure in this first experiment in education
which made Edgeworth devote so much care to the training of his
younger children.

CHAPTER 4

After six years of happiness Honora's health gave way, and
consumption set in; some months of anxious nursing followed
before she died, to the great grief of her husband. She left
several children, and her dying wish was that he should marry
her sister Elizabeth.

Mr. Edgeworth was, at first, benumbed by grief, and unable to
take an interest in his former pursuits; but in the society of
his wife's family he gradually recovered cheerfulness, and
began to consider his wife's dying advice to marry her sister.
He remarks: 'Nothing is more erroneous than the common
belief, that a man who has lived in the greatest happiness
with one wife will be the most averse to take another. On the
contrary, the loss of happiness, whic