Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/581

 568 with tools, or in a farm or shop, the destitute man or widow who has been “sold up.”

There are pleasanter spectacles than this in the high summer tide: but we must not overlook the drawbacks of either the natural or the social season. We must hope that while seedtime and harvest, summer and winter, day and night shall never cease, but wheel round with eternal regularity, men will by degrees outgrow their ignorance and folly, and keep a steady progress onward.

the northern coast of Antrim, about midway between Portrush and the Giant’s Causeway, perched on a rock almost wholly separated from the mainland by a precipitous chasm, stand the romantic and interesting ruins of the castle of Dunluce. They are endowed with peculiarly impressive associations, and for those who take a melancholy pleasure in the contemplation of the grandeur of things whose glory has faded, there could hardly be found a spot which could rouse more poetic or pathetic imagination, from the idea it gives of decayed strength and majestic solitude. You cannot tear yourself away from this magic spot where you wander with rapture. Its walls convey the idea of being fraught with reminiscences of dark and hidden deeds, and the roaring of the wild waves, as they dash irritably on the rocks some hundred feet below, seems to struggle to give utterance to some painful secret of which they alone have been witnesses. The sole means of entering the fortress is by a bridge, of about fifteen inches in width, which spans with a single arch the dreadful abyss beneath, and being unprotected wholly on either side, requires a steady head and foot to enable you to cross it; though the idea of falling is far worse than the actual danger of doing so. Hollowed out of the rock on which the castle is built, and immediately beneath it, is a cavern of vast dimensions, and the beating surge re-echoes with thundering monotony through its lofty recesses.

If you have courage to cross the bridge, on reaching the other side, you are conducted to the right, into a circular apartment called Mava’s Tower, and are desired to remark how carefully it is swept.

“Who undertakes that office?” you ask.

“No living being,” is the answer. “Every night this prison-like chamber is swept like a ballroom, and yet no one enters it.”

“Who, then, keeps it in order?”

“Mava, the Sweeper of Dunluce, and the banshee of the Macquillains, the ancient lords of Dunluce.”

In the fifteenth century, Mava (according to the old legend connected with the spot), a young girl of seventeen, was the only daughter of the Lord of Dunluce. Gentle and charitable, she rose at day-break, and went forth daily to relieve the wants of her father’s poor dependents.

“Look at her!” said the shepherds, as they saw her pass along, “she is as bright as the spring sun, and fairer than the morning star.”