Meanwhile the children pattered up the hill and spoke no word until they reached the summit.  Sitting down under the great portcullis, they munched their bread and sugar amicably together, Mike’s eyes pensively gazing in front of him the while, and Roseen’s roving hither and thither with quick, eager glances.  Suddenly she tilted her head backward, gazing at a narrow horizontal slit in the masonry high over their heads.  “That’s where they used to throw the bilin’ lead down in ould ancient times when anybody wanted to come fightin’ them.”

Mike gazed upwards likewise, still slowly munching, but said nothing.

“When you an’ me grows up an’ gets married to each other, the way we always said we would,” pursued Roseen, “this ‘ud be a gran’ place to live.”

Mike’s face brightened, and he nodded enthusiastically.  “It would so,” he agreed.

“There’s lots o’ beau’ful rooms that we could live in,” resumed Roseen, “an’ we’d make a fire in that great big enormous stone hearth beyant, an’ we’d ate off o’ that big stone table, an’ when anybody ’ud offer to come annoyin’ us, we’d just melt a bit o’ lead an’ throw it down on them.”

Mike looked astonished and perturbed.  “Sure it ’ud burn the flesh off o’ their bones.  I wouldn’t like to be doin’ that, Roseen.”

“If they was rale bad people,” said Roseen persuasively; “rale wicked, crule people, the same as me gran’father beyant, it ’ud sarve them right,—­or we might throw down a sup of bilin’ wather,” she added as a concession.

Mike appeared unconvinced.

“I don’t think ye have a right to be talkin’ that way of your gran’father,” he said reprovingly; “an’ he isn’t that bad.  He never offered to lay a finger on me as long as I am in it, barring the time I let the sheep into the hay-field.”

“He’s a crule ould villain!” returned Roseen conclusively.  “Look at all he done on me mother.  Come on now,” with a sudden change of tone, “whistle a tune an’ we’ll have a dance.”

Mike looked lovingly at the last fragments of his griddle cake, the enjoyment of which he had been anxious to prolong as much as possible, and then after a little sigh, crammed them into his mouth and led the way to the giant’s wrestling ground.

“Wait a bit,” he cried, as Roseen took hold of the folds of her ragged skirt daintily in the finger and thumb of each hand, and looked expectantly towards him, “I’m just goin’ to thramp a bit in the joynt’s steps.”

“What are ye doin’ that for at all?” asked Roseen, knitting her brows.

“Sure me father bid me never go past this way widout stampin’ them down a bit to keep them from gettin’ smaller,” answered Mike, hammering diligently with his bare heel at the corners of the “futprints” of the mighty Fin-ma-coul.