"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." "I'll tell you a tale about it now; it's easy to make up stories about castles like that," Feena whispered to Kathleen. "There was once an Irish princess, as beautiful as the dawn," she began in a low voice, "and her father, the king, locked her up in one of those old towers and set a dragon to guard her. A prince came riding by on a horse as black as night. He saw the princess standing at the tower window, looking out over the sea, and he fell in love with her sad, sweet face. So he rode down to the cave where the Witch of the Sea lived all alone,—" "Here we are, at the end of our car ride," her father interrupted. "Now for a walk along the shore and a climb over the rocks of the Causeway." The Giant's Causeway is a low rocky pier which stretches out into the ocean about six hundred feet, gradually sinking below the waves. It is composed of about forty thousand upright stone columns which are fitted closely together, the cracks between them being very narrow but showing plainly the sides of each column. Most of the columns have five, six, or seven sides; some have four or eight; a very few have nine; and there is one among the forty thousand which has only three sides. "It looks like the beginning of the world," said Mrs. Malone, looking up at the enormous cliffs and out over the tremendous, swelling sea,—the big waves roaring and crashing among the black rocks. "Those tall crags stand there as if they had been guarding the ocean for centuries." "So they have," replied her husband, "and they guarded this part of our island from the golden-haired tribes of the De Danaans, when they came sailing across the sea from the north some four thousand years ago. These great cliffs offered no shelter and they had to sail west or south to find a landing-place." "Four thousand years ago," repeated Kathleen. "Were there men living in Ireland as long ago as that?" "Yes," replied her uncle, "and Ireland was as pleasant a place to live in then as it is now. It was a land of forests, echoing in spring and summer to the songs of the birds. Wild cattle, deer and wolves roamed through the dense woods. Everywhere in the deep forests were blue lakes and silver rivers teeming with trout and salmon; and the seas beat restlessly against the coast, while flocks of white gulls sailed peacefully between the blue of the sky and the blue of the sea."