for over eighty years, busy, beneficent, modest, and intelligent to the
last. When she died she was mourned as unmarried women of eighty are not
often mourned.

The present owner of Edgeworthstown told us that he could just remember
her, lying dead upon her bed, and her face upon the pillow, and the
sorrowful tears of the household; and how he and the other little
children were carried off by a weeping aunt into the woods, to comfort
and distract them on the funeral day. He also told us of an incident
prior to this event which should not be overlooked. How he himself,
being caught red-handed, at the age of four or thereabouts, with his
hands in a box of sugar-plums, had immediately confessed the awful fact
that he had been about to eat them, and he was brought then and there
before his Aunt Maria for sentence. She at once decided that he had
behaved Nobly in speaking the truth, and that he must be rewarded
in kind for his praiseworthy conduct, and be allowed to keep the
sugar-plums!

This little story after half a century certainly gives one pleasure
still to recall, and proves, I think, that cakes may be enjoyed long
after they have been eaten, and also that there is a great deal to be
said for justice with lollipops in the scale. But what would Rosamond's
parents have thought of such a decision? One shudders to think of their
disapproval, or of that of dear impossible Mr. Thomas Day, with his
trials and experiments of melted sealing-wax upon little girls' bare
arms, and his glasses of tar-water so inflexibly administered. Miss
Edgeworth, who suffered from her eyes, recalls how Mr. Day used to bring
the dose, the horrible tar-water, every morning with a 'Drink this,
Miss Maria!' and how she dared not resist, though she thought she saw
something of kindness and pity beneath all his apparent severity.