Pink and white mayflowers, blue wall-flowers and yellow daffies grew under their feet, and the fields were full of blue-bells. Robins and thrushes sang over their heads, and in the distance they heard the sound of a hunting horn and the baying of the hounds.
Danny was waiting for them at the boat landing, and Patrick made haste to gather his party into a boat and row them out upon the blue water, so that they could watch the happy crowds coming and going along the shore. Kathleen looked back across the fields and saw hundreds of men, women, and children, all dressed in their very best, trooping toward the lake, carrying lunch-baskets for their May-day picnic on Lough Gara.
“Oh, Molly darling,” she whispered, “it’s better than anything we ever thought of in Donegal. It’s a wish come true.”
Mary Ellen clung to her sister’s hand, listening to the happy voices calling from boat to boat, and from water to shore. “It must be the place Grandma Barry used to tell us about,” she said,—“the place where happiness is so common you can buy it for a ha’penny.”
Kathleen’s eyes were fixed on the green island toward which Danny was rowing them. “It looks more like the home of the fairies than does the Rock of Doon,” she told Bee.
“They do say that the fairies haunt Lough Gara,” her cousin answered. “At night, when there’s no one to see them, they gallop round and round the lake, winding their hunting horns and following the fairy hounds just as the ladies and gentlemen do at the meets on the big estate at French Park.”
Just then the boat touched the shore of the little island and there was no more time to talk of fairies. Pretty Mary Hever and her brother John were waiting for them under the trees, and every one was ready to help in the merry fun of setting out the lunch.
The girls plaited wreaths of flowers and oak leaves, and crowned Bee and Mary Ellen; John Hever found a spring of clear water and filled the cups; and Bee set out the sandwiches and cheese and some of her delicious cookies which were the best in all Tonroe.
“There’ll be just time enough for the lunch before we go to Kingsland for the sports,” Patrick said, as he sat down on the grass between Kathleen and Mary Ellen and began to help them to cookies the very first thing.
“Be off with your joking,” said Bee. “We can’t hurry the picnic like that. Half the fun of the lunch is the blarney that goes with it.”