"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." Then she said aloud to Cousin Bee, "It would be a fine place for the fairies to dance under the pink and white trees in the rath beyond the garden. Did the old chiefs have their picnics there?" "Whist, jewel, the Irish chiefs had other things to do," said her cousin. "They had to be fighting with other chiefs, and killing the wild beasts; and sometimes they went off hunting foxes and deer through the green forests, but I'm thinking they had no time for picnics." Mary Ellen was standing by Kathleen's side, her sightless eyes looking beyond the green hedge toward the beautiful mound of trees that scented the air with thousands of blossoms. "What did the chiefs do with the forts?" she asked. "They lived in them," answered Bee. "First they built a great circular wall of earth or stone to keep out wild beasts and robbers; and then inside the wall they built their house. Sometimes there were two or three walls, one outside the other. The forts were called raths, and if a king lived in them his house was called a dun." "That rath looks like a grove of trees now," said Kathleen. "The trees have grown up on the walls, and the houses are all gone hundreds of years ago," Bee replied. "What did the houses look like?" asked Mary Ellen. "The darlin'! she wants to know how it all looked just as if she had the sight," said Bee, putting her arm around the child. "Well," she went on, "the houses were shaped like bee-hives. They were built of poles all woven in and out with twigs, like wicker baskets, so the books say. Many a town in Ireland to-day is built where a chief's rath or a king's dun once stood, and it gets its name by that token. There's Dundalk and Dunglow and Dunmore, Rathmelton, Rathdrum and Rathcormack. There are duns and raths all over the country."