The train was now passing through a glen where the bracken leaped six feet high—a glen dim and dream-like, a vast glen, echo-haunted, and peopled with waterfalls, pines, and ferns that grow nowhere else as they grow here.
It is the glen of a thousand echoes. Call here, and Echo replies, and replies, and replies; and you hear your commonplace voice—the voice that you ordered a beefsteak with yesterday—chasing itself past fern and pine and fading away in Fairyland.
A tunnel took the train, and then out of the roaring darkness it swept into sunlight again, and great plains of bracken and heather.
Miss Grimshaw undid the strap of her rug and packed her newspapers and book inside. The train was slowing. By the time she had got all her things together it was drawing up at a long platform, whose notice-board read:—
CLOYNE
The girl opened the door of the carriage and stepped on to the platform and into a world of sunlight, silence, and breeze.
The air was like wine.
There were few people on the platform; a woman in a red cloak, a priest who had stepped out of the train, a couple of farmers, and several porters busily engaged in taking some baskets of live fowl (to judge by the sound) out of the guard's van, and a seedy-looking individual in a tall hat and frock-coat, who looked strangely out of keeping with his surroundings.
"Is there not a porter to take luggage out of the train?" asked Miss Grimshaw of a long, squint-eyed, foxy-looking man, half-groom, half-gamekeeper, who was walking along the train length peeping into each carriage as if in search of something.