fun!' they
threw themselves on their backs upon the thymy grass, and lay still for
several seconds ere they sat up to look back at the thickly-wooded
ravine, winding crevice-like in and out between the overlapping skirts of
the hills, whose rugged heads cut off the horizon. Then merrily sharing
the first instalment of luncheon with their barefooted guide, they turned
their faces onwards, where all their way seemed one bare gray moor,
rising far off into the outline of Luggela, a peak overhanging the
semblance of a crater.

Nothing afforded them much more mirth than a rude bridge, consisting of a
single row of square-headed unconnected posts, along the heads of which
Cilla three times hopped backwards and forwards for the mere drollery of
the thing, with vigour unabated by the long walk over the dreary moorland
fields with their stone walls.

By the side of the guide's cabin the car awaited them, and mile after
mile they drove on through treeless wastes, the few houses with their
thatch anchored down by stones, showing what winds must sweep along those
unsheltered tracts. The desolate solitude began to weary the volatile
pair into silence; ere the mountains rose closer to them, they crossed a
bridge over a stony stream begirt with meadows, and following its course
came into sight of their goal.

Here was Glendalough, a _cul de sac_ between the mountains, that shelved
down, enclosing it on all sides save the entrance, through which the
river issued. Their summits were bare, of the gray stone that lay in
fragments everywhere, but their sides were clothed with the lovely Irish
green pasture-land, intermixed with brushwood and trees, and a beauteous
meadow surrounded the white ring-like beach of pure white sand and
pebbles bordering the outer lake, whose gray waters sparkled in the sun.
Its twin lake, divided from it by so narrow a belt of ground, that the
white beaches lay on their green setting, like the outline of a figure of
8, had a more wild and gloomy aspect, lying deeper within the hollow, and
the hills coming sheer down on it at the further end in all their
grayness unsoftened by any verdure. The gray was that of absolute black
and white intermingled in the grain of the stone, and this was peculiarly
gloomy, but in the summer sunshine it served but to set off the
brilliance of the verdure, and the whole air of the valley was so bright
that Cilly declared that it had been traduced, and that no skylark of
sense