“Perhaps he will meet us at the Giant’s Causeway,” suggested Danny. “Uncle Tom wrote to him that we would be there to-day.”
“Then we will be going over to see Mary Ellen to-morrow,” said Kathleen with a little sigh of happiness, and she folded her hands in her lap and sat for a long time looking quietly out of the window.
“The sea! the sea!” cried Columba, as the car rounded a curve in the road, and there lay before them the blue waters of the Atlantic.
Immediately there was the greatest excitement among the children. “Think of our never having seen the ocean before!” exclaimed Feena, “and our little green island is all surrounded by it.”
“Don’t be calling your own country little,” Deena reproved her. “Faith, we could whip the whole world before breakfast if we’d put our minds to it.”
“There’s the sea again,” called Columba. “See how white the chalk cliffs look, where the sun is shining on them.”
“There were chalk cliffs in Tonroe,” Kathleen told him, “but they were not so high as those, and they didn’t have such wonderful shapes.”
“Look, Kathleen, do you see those men down there among the rocks gathering seaweed?” Danny asked. “That is the way I used to gather it for Farmer Flynn. See the big pile of it they have; and there is one man loading it into a cart.”
“And look, Kathleen, there’s a castle up there on the rocks,” said Feena, turning to point out to her cousin the gray towers of an ancient castle perched high on a rugged cliff.
“That’s Dunluce Castle,” Uncle Tom told them. “It has stood there a long time, and could tell many a tale of old Irish wars.”