“It’s the cute way nature has with her!” exclaimed Kathleen, holding up her face for the white-thorn petals to blow down upon it. She and Mary Ellen had been to the old rath after flowers for the May-baskets, and were returning to the cottage, where Cousin Bee was waiting to take them to Lough Gara for the May-day picnic. A breeze was scattering the petals from the trees, which were “as white with bloom as the snow of one night,” and Mary Ellen turned her face to the sky so that she, too, might feel the soft shower.
“Sure, nature has a cute way,” Kathleen repeated. “When a cloud hides the bright sun and you’d think an Irish rain was going to fall the next minute, the wind gives a laugh and sends a snowstorm instead; and here it is the first day of May, and the blackbirds are singing in the meadow.”
“Can you see the snow on the mountains far away?” asked Mary Ellen.
“No, but the white chalk cliffs shine like snow,” replied Kathleen. “It seems as if we must forget, here in Tonroe, about the mountains and the cold, snowy winter. When I wake up in the morning and hear the lark singing his way up into the sky, and smell the May-bloom through the window, I almost forget the gray stones and low clouds of purple Donegal.”
“Do you mind the old black crows that used to call over the hills all day long?” asked Mary Ellen.
“Of caws! Of caws!” croaked Kathleen, so much like an old crow that her sister made her do it again and again, “to remind her of home,” she said.
The children had been at Cousin Bee’s little farm in Tonroe for over two weeks, and Danny had made himself so useful that Patrick offered him good wages to stay and help him through the planting season.
“Sure, I care more for work than for anything else just now,” Danny made answer, and he rolled up his sleeves and went to work with a will.
“There’s no need for Kathleen to go to Kilkenny either, now that the school is near to closing for the summer,” Bee suggested.
So Kathleen washed the dishes and watched the young turkeys. She fed the hens and found their eggs when they stole nests in the little village of grain-stacks in the hay-haggard. And, best of all, she found an old cow-bell in the barn and set Mary Ellen to ringing it every time the thieving magpie came back to his nest, until he was glad to take his family away to live in a quieter neighborhood and leave the young turkeys to wander through the old rath in safety.