"Don't you feel as if you smelt the sea?" said Murtagh, throwing his head back to draw in the air better.
"Yes, and the heather," said Winnie, "doesn't it get into you and make you feel free? Oh, wouldn't it be glorious if we could live up here really with our tribe, and race over the mountains all day, and live on blackberries, and fraughans, and nuts? To be perfectly free! Oh, Murtagh, just think what a life it would be! We'd have ponies, and ride about, and we'd have a secret hiding-place, and be like good fairies to all the villages round. If any one was in trouble, we would carry them off and hide them and feed them till the trouble was over, and some day we would rise and set Ireland free. Oh, I would like to be queen of a tribe, lead them into battle, and shout 'For Ireland and Liberty!'"
At first no one had paid attention to what Winnie and Murtagh were saying, but as Winnie grew excited she spoke louder, and her last words were received with a general cheer. The children's spirits were rising to such a pitch that they were glad of any excuse for making a noise.
"And we'd follow you to the death, Miss Winnie," cried Pat O'Toole.
"That would we," exclaimed the others, enthusiastically. But at this moment their excitement was turned into another channel by an exclamation of "Hurrah, there's our tower!" which came from Bobbo, who was sitting on the shaft driving.
"Our tower" was a very old gray ruin of which scarcely anything remained. There was an enormously thick wall with an archway in it, and a worn flight of steps leading up through the thickness of the wall to a little room above the archway; and that, with the crumbling remains of walls which had once enclosed court-yards, on either side of the archway, formed the whole tower.
"Hurrah!" echoed the others as the cart stopped at the bottom of the slope. "Now then, out with us and to work as fast as we can!"
"You dear, dear old mountains, how I do love you!" cried Winnie, throwing herself flat upon the heather, whilst the others were descending from the cart. In another minute the cart was unyoked. Tommie was tethered to a tree, and the children, with their arms full of evergreens, swarmed up the slope and into the tower.