Page:Maria Edgeworth (Zimmern 1883).djvu/180

168 pocket-book—Friendship's Offering for 1825, dizened out. I fear yon will think it too line for your taste, but there is in it,. is you will find, the old Mental Thermometer, which was once a favourite of yours. You will wonder how it came there. Simply thus: I. autumn came by the coach a parcel containing just such a book as this for last year, and a letter from Mr. Lupton Relfe—a foreigner settled in London—and he prayed in most polite bookseller strain that I would look over my portfolio for some trifle for this book for 1826, I might have looked over "my portfolio" till doomsday, as I have not an unpublished scrap, except Taken for Granted. But I recollected the Mental Thermometer, and that it had never been out, except in the Irish Farmer's Journal,—not known in England. So I routed in the garret, under pyramids of old newspapers, with my mother's prognostics that I never should find it. and loud prophecies that I should catch my death, which I 'lid not; but dirty and dusty and cobwebby, I came forth, after two hours' grovelling, with my object in my hand. Cut it out. added a few lines of new end to it, and packed it off to Lupton Relfe. telling him that it was an old thing written when I was sixteen. Weeks elapsed, and I heard no more, when there came a letter exuberant in gratitude, and sending a parcel containing six copies of the new memorandum book, and a most beautiful twelfth edition of Scott's poetical works, bound in the most elegant manner, and with most beautifully engraved frontispieces and vignettes, and a £5 note. I was quite ashamed—but I have done all I could for him, by giving the Friendship's Offerings to all the tine people could think of. The set of Scott's works made a nice new year's gift for Harriet: she had seen this edition at Edinburgh and particularly wished for it. The £5 I have sent to Harriet Beaufort to he laid out in books for Fanny Stewart. Little did I think the poor old Thermometer would give me so much pleasure. Here comes the carriage rolling round. I feel guilty. What will my mother say to me. so long a letter at this time of night? Yours affectionately, in all the haste of guilt. conscience stricken: that is. found out. No: all safe, all innocent—because not found out. By the author of Moral Tales and Practical Education.

In 1825, Scott paid his long-promised visit to Edgeworthstown. He came in August, bringing with him his daughter, Lockhart, and Mr. Crampton, a surgeon friend of the Edgeworths, "who equally gratified both the novelists by breaking the toils of his great practice