“Kathleen never saw so many houses together before, till she went to Letterkenny yesterday to take the train away from Donegal,” Danny explained.
“Then she’ll like to ride over to Boyle with Bee on market days,” said Patrick kindly; “there’s houses a-plenty there. But the plains of Boyle will look flat enough to her after the mountains of her own county.”
“Oh, Mary Ellen, come here!” cried Kathleen, who had gone to the back door for another look at the village. “There’s a church steeple far away beyond a hilleen, and there’s the fine National School building that Grandma Barry used to tell us about. It’s on the little hill, and I can see it every time I look out at the door. But the mountains are far away. There’s not one to be seen near by.”
“Perhaps they have put on a cloak of darkness,” suggested Mary Ellen. “Is there nothing at all where the mountains rightly belong?”
“It’s better than mountains,” said Kathleen decidedly, to Patrick’s delight. “There’s another hilleen of trees just beyond the hedge, and it looks like a picnic garden, for the trees are all covered with creels and creels of pink and white blossoms.”
“She means the rath, and the hawthorn trees,” exclaimed Patrick.
“It is an old fort, darlin’,” Bee explained, “and it was built by a great chief hundreds of years ago; but it looks like a little hill now. There’s another just forninst the church steeple; and one off to the side of the house that you’d best not go too near.”
“Why not?” asked Kathleen curiously.
“An old chief was buried there hundreds of years ago,” answered Bee, “and now the fairies live in it.”
“Oh, Mary Ellen,” whispered Kathleen, “there are fairies here after all, and we were thinkin’ we had left them behind us in Donegal.”