several times in danger of being thrust aside. She wrote to her sister: —
My dear Harriet, can you conceive yourself to be an old lamp at the point of extinction, and dreading the smell you would make at going out. and the execrations which in your dying flickerings you might hear? And then you can conceive the sudden starting up again of the flame when fresh oil is poured into the lamp. And can you conceive what that poor lamp would feel returning to light and life ? So felt I when I had read your letter on reading what I sent to you of Helen. You have given me new life and spirit to go on with her. I would have gone on from principle, and the desire to do what my father advised — to finish whatever I began; but now I feel all the difference between working for a dead or a live horse.
To the day of her death, Miss Edgeworth never became the prudent, staid, self-contained person, we should imagine her from her books, did we possess them only as guides to her character. Rosamond remained as generously impulsive as ever. On one occasion she writes to Mrs. Ruxton: —
It is very happy for your little niece that you have so much the habit of expressing to her your kind feelings. I really think that if my thoughts and feelings were shut up completely within me, I should burst in a week, like a steam engine without a snifting-clack. now called by the grander name of a safety-valve. You want to know what I am doing and thinking of: of ditches, drains, and sewers, of dragging quicks from one hedge and sticking them down into another, at the imminent peril of their green lives; of two houses to let, one tenant promised from the Isle of Man, and another from the Irish Survey; of two bullfinches, each in his cage on the table — one who would sing if he could, and the other who could sing, I am told, if he would. Then I am thinking for three hours a day of Helen, to what purpose I dare not say.
Before the year 1830 was ended, Miss Edgeworth had lost this aunt, whom she had loved so long and fondly. It was the severing of a life-long friendship, the heaviest blow that had befallen her since her father's death. She was in London when the event
