grazing lands, with their herds of cattle, which stretched far away as the eye could reach beyond, all seemed to indicate that its owner had been so long settled on the spot as to have learned at last to look upon it rather as his rightful inheritance than as a gift of conquest. {83} Castled keep and merry mill, trees and cattle and cultivated fields, the girl seemed to take all in, in that long, mournful gaze which she cast upon them; but the thoughts and regrets which they forced upon her, growing in bitterness as she dwelt upon them, became at last too strong for calm endurance, and throwing herself down upon her knees upon the cold, damp earth, she covered her face with both her hands, and burst into a passionate fit of weeping. Her sobs must have roused up the inmates of the hut; for almost immediately afterward the door was cautiously unclosed, and an ancient dame, with a large colored handkerchief covering her gray hairs, and tied under her chin, even as her descendants wear it to this hour, peeped out, with an evident resolve to see as much and be as little seen as possible in return, by the person who had, at that undue hour, disturbed her quiet slumbers. The moment, however, she discovered who it was that was weeping there, all thoughts of selfish fear seemed to vanish from her mind, and with a wild cry, in which love and grief and sympathy were mingled, as only an Irish cry can mix them, she flung her strong, bony arms around the girl, and exclaimed in Irish, a language with which--we may as well, once for all remark--the proud lords of the Pale were quite conversant, using it not only as a medium of communication with their Irish dependents, but by preference to English, in their familiar intercourse with each other. For this reason, while we endeavor to give the old lady's conversation verbatim, as far as idiom and ideas are concerned, we have ventured to omit all the mispronunciations and bad grammarisms which, whether on the stage or in a novel, are rightly or wrongly considered to be the one thing needed toward the true delineation of the Irish character, whatever the rank or education of the individual thus put on the scene may happen to be. "O my darling, my darling!" cried the old woman, almost lifting the girl by main force from the ground; "my heart's blood, a-cushla machree! what are you doing down there upon the damp grass, (sure it will be the death of you, it will,) with the morning fog wrapping round you like a curtain? Is there anything wrong up there at the castle? or what is it all, at all, that brings you down here before the sun has had time to say 'Good-morrow' to the tree-tops?" "O Grannie, Grannie!" sobbed the girl, "have you not heard? do you not know already? It was to say good-by--I could not go without it. Grannie! I never shall see you again--perhaps never."