The Stay-At-Homes by Jane Barlow

On the 1st of March, last year, it might have been noticed that people were continually going in and out of Letterowen Railway Station; yet the number of passengers who arrived and departed by train was certainly no larger than usual. The station is rather a new feature in the village, children of smallish growth remembering a time when its fine pink-washed gables, and brilliant flower-borders, and curious turnstile did not exist; still it had been there long enough for the charm of novelty to have been worn off, and that was not the _comether_ which on this dusty-grey, east-windy March Sunday drew thither so many visitors, who had no tickets to buy, nor other official business to transact. What they dropped in to look at was placarded upon the walls of the bare little waiting-rooms, where Jim Neligan, the porter, had been busy with a paste brush the evening before-so excessively so, indeed, being new to his post and zealous, that the station-master had inquired sarcastically whether he intended to paper the whole place over entirely, and if he didn't think he might as well stick on another layer atop of the first. But the result of Jim's lavishness was that wherever you turned there were the thick black letters announcing a special cheap excursion to Dublin on next Tuesday fortnight, which, as everybody well knew, would be St Patrick's Day. Peter Carroll, who helped to clean lamps at the station, and his mother, who scrubbed floors there, had spread the report of the advertisement overnight, and it sounded so very remarkable that more people than not twirled the turnstile in the course of the morning and came down the zig-zag path to see for themselves.

The inhabitants of Letterowen are not great travellers. Their railway is only a branch of a branch line, and while most of them have not gone farther along it than Brockenbeg Junction, seven miles north, by no means few have never got even so far. It is a place where in soft weather the platform frequently takes a pattern of bare feet, and bare feet seldom set out on long journeys by rail. As for Dublin, that had hitherto seemed a goal which remoteness and magnitude made hardly accessible even to imagination. Letterowen folk considered vaguely that it would need a sight of money and a powerful length of time to bring you thither, and what might be expected to befall you there was so hard to say that your return seemed misty indeed. Yet here was a printed notice boldly promising-"To Dublin and back for two shillings," and going into circumstantial details about a train departing at six in the morning and arriving at noon, and leaving again at midnight. "Twenty-four hours for twenty-four pence," it ended epigrammatically, and some of its readers felt no manner of doubt that each one of them would be an hour of rapture unalloyed. Others were less confident. Old Dan Molloy had heard tell of there being such thick fogs in Dublin most whiles that people "were as apt to walk plump into the river as anywhere else, which was a terrible dangerous thing."