“Then I’ll be laughing often, Ian dear, and some day I’ll catch them and drive them out into the sunshine, and then they’ll melt--ay, ay, they’ll melt for sure, Ian, and what will you be after doing then?”
“Well, like Fionula and the wild swans, Peterkin, I’ll rise up and soar away on the great flood of the sun across the sea till I come to Hy Brásil, the Isle of Youth far away in the West.”
“Yes, I know,” Peterkin said gravely: “Hy Brásil: Eilidh told me that is where she and you are going to live. Will you take me there too?”
“Yes, you will come there too, mochree, some day.”
“But with you -- when you and Eilidh go?”
“Perhaps we’ll not be going there together, Peterkin. But we won’t be forgetting our dear little Peterkin. We’ll be on the shore looking out for you when you come.”
“Why are your eyes wet, Ian, and Eilidh’s too?”
“Why, you unfeeling little wretch, it’s because we have left the poor swans, Fionula, and Aed, and Fiachra, and Conn, alone on the rough seas of the Moyle all this while.”
“Tell me, tell me now about the children of Lir. Did they see any one up there? Were they ever happy?”
“Eilidh knows the rest of the story as well as I do, Peterkin, so go and sit in her lap while she tells it to you and to me.”
With that, Ian Mor rose and put another log on the red peats. A shower of sparks shot up into the dark hollow of the chimney. Peterkin laughed.
“Hush!” whispered Eilidh, with smiling eyes: and then in her sweet, low voice resumed the tale of the Children of Lir, from where Ian had stopped.
It was at the edge of winter when Fionula and her brothers reached the wild bleak seas of the Moyle.
At first there was no too bitter cold or too fierce tempestuousness to make their evil lot still more hard to bear; but sad indeed were their hearts as day after day they saw nothing but the same grey skies, the same grey wastes and dark sullen waves, the same bleak, rocky coasts inhabited only by the cormorant and the sea-mew. Never to see a familiar face, never to hear a familiar voice: to dwell from morning dusk till evening dark in loneliness and sorrow--that, indeed, was a hard fate upon the four children of Lir. From hunger and cold, too, they suffered much. No longer could they be cheered as they were on Lough Darvra, and often and often they lamented that their doom could not have permitted them to remain as swans indeed, but as swans on that now dear and home-sweet inland sea of Darvra.