"Can we get lunch?" I inquired.
"You can," she answered, short and sharp like the snap of a whip, and she stood in the doorway staring at us, without making any sign that we should enter.
"Is it ready?" I ventured further, for the long drive had made us very hungry.
"It is not."
Let me say here that very rarely does any one of Irish blood say "yes" or "no" in answer to a question. When you ask the man at the station, "Is this the train for So-and-so?" he will invariably answer, "It is," or "It is not," as the case may be. When you ask your jarvey if he thinks it will rain to-day, his invariable answer is "It will not." I never heard an Irishman admit unreservedly that it was going to rain. But before I had time to ask the red-headed girl any further questions, she was hustled aside by a typical little brown Irishwoman, who asked us in and made us welcome. Lunch would be ready in fifteen minutes, she said; meanwhile, if we wished, we could walk to the waterfall.
Of course we did wish, and set eagerly forth past the end of the upper lake, across a bridge, past a great empty hotel which was falling to decay, and up a little stream to the fall. It is really a series of rapids rather than a fall, and only mildly pretty; but growing abundantly in the damp ground along the margin of the stream was what Betty declared to be the true shamrock—a very beautiful trefoil, evidently a variety of oxalis, and certainly much nearer our ideal of the shamrock than the skimpy plant shown us by the gardener at Clondalkin. We gathered some of it, and then hastened back—for we didn't want to be late for lunch. As we were passing the lake, we noticed an extremely dirty and unkempt individual, who looked like a vagabond, sitting on a stone, and as soon as he saw us, he jumped up and fell in beside us.
"Your honour will be goin' to St. Kevin's bed," he began.
"Where is the bed?" I asked.
"In the cliff beyant there, sir," and he pointed across the lake.
"How do we get to it?"