welcome; it is the artificial people who are sometimes one thing,
sometimes another, and who form themselves on the weaknesses and fancies
of those among whom they live, who are really terrifying.

The shadow of the bird's wing flitted across the window of my bedroom,
and the sun was shining next morning when I awoke. I could see the cows,
foot deep in the grass under the hawthorns. After breakfast we went out
into the grounds and through an arched 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,