“And this little round lake here,” she went on, “they’ll all tell you ’t was made by bodily lifting out a great cylinder of rock and carting it miles through the air and putting it down in the sea out there, where it’s ever since been known as Fasnet Rock. They say the measurements are precisely the same. I forget now if ’t was the Archangel Gabriel did that, too, or the divil.” “The result comes to about the same thing,” commented the engineer. “Whoever did it,” he went on, scanning the regularly rounded sides of the pool, “made a good workmanlike job of it.” “No one’s ever been able to touch the bottom of it,” said Kate, with pride. “Oh, come, now--I’ve heard that of every second lake in Ireland.” “Well--certainly _I’ve_ not tested it,” she replied, frostily, “but ’t is well known that if you sink a bottle in this lake ’t will be found out there in Dun-manus Bay fourteen hundred feet below us.” “Why, the very first principle of hydrostatics,” began Bernard, with controversial eagerness. Then he stopped short, stroked his smooth chin, and changed the subject abruptly. “Speaking of bottles,” he said, “I see your man there is eying that lunch basket with the expression of a meat-axe. Wouldn’t it be a clever idea to let him unpack it?” The while John Pat stripped the basket of its contents, and spread them upon a cloth in the mossy shadow of an overhanging boulder, the two by a common impulse strolled over to the eastern edge of the summit. “Beyond Roaring Water Bay the O’Driscoll Castles begin,” said Kate. “They tell me they’re poor trifles compared wid ours.” “I like to hear you say ‘ours,’” the young man broke in. “I want you to keep right on remembering all the while that I belong to the family. And--and I wish to heaven there was something I could do to show how tickled to death I am that I do belong to it!” “I have never been here before,” Kate said, in a musing tone, which carried in it a gentle apology for abstraction. “I did not know there was anything so big and splendid in the world.” The spell of this mighty spectacle at once enchanted and oppressed her. She stood gazing down upon it for some minutes, holding up her hand as a plea for silence when her companion would have spoken. Then, with a lingering sigh, she turned away and led the slow walk back toward the lake. “’Twas like dreaming,” she said with gravity; “and a strange thought came to me: ’Twas that this lovely Ireland I looked down upon was beautiful with the beauty of death; that ’twas the corpse of me country I was taking a last view of. Don’t laugh at me! I had just that feeling. Ah, poor, poor Ireland!” Bernard saw tears glistening upon her long, black lashes, and scarcely knew his own voice when he heard it, in such depths of melancholy was it pitched. “Better times are coming now,” he said. “If we open up the mines we are counting on it ought to give work to at least two hundred men.” She turned sharply upon him.