"Well, what about it?"
"There is a very fine prospect from it."
"How do you know?"
"I often go there."
"You!" he exclaimed, with an astonished look that amused me, "and pray how do you get there?"
"Look!"
I sprang up a steep path in the rock; every step of it was familiar to me; I had reached the hollow, and was laughing down at Cornelius, before he recovered from his amazement. He followed me lightly, but chid me all the way.
"What could tempt you to do such a mad thing and to come to such an eyrie as this?" he asked as he stood by me in the wide hollow and under the broad shelter of an overhanging rock.
"Look at that glorious prospect, Cornelius," I replied, sitting down and making him sit down by me.
I remember well both the day and the spot. The blue sky, the sea of a blue still more deep, the yellow beach, the brown wall of rock, gave back the same ardent glow; the place seemed enchanted into the quietness of noon, save when some solitary raven suddenly left a cleft in the rock and, descending with a swoop, hovered a black speck over the beach in search of prey. We sat pleasantly within reach of the cool spray of the spring; a breeze from above brought us the sweet scent of unseen fields of gorse in bloom; below us the sea boiled in white and angry surf amongst the rocks, and thence spread away in seemingly unbroken smoothness, until it met and mingled with the distant horizon.