hed doorway into the kitchen garden.
It might have been some corner of Italy or the South of France; the
square tower of the granary rose high against the blue, the gray walls
were hung with messy fruit trees, pigeons were darting and flapping
their wings, gardeners were at work, the very vegetables were growing
luxuriant and romantic and edged by thick borders of violet pansy;
crossing the courtyard, we came into the village street, also orderly
and white-washed. The soft limpid air made all things into pictures,
into Turners, into Titians. A Murillo-like boy, with dark eyes, was
leaning against a wall, with his 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 ol