“It’s my station!” The Welshman suddenly addressed himself. He reared up, banged down the bushes on his head under a black hat, collected his suitcase and overcoat, and almost swept away with it the parcel with the “Wee Cottage” in it, belonging to the young wife. He got past them, dragging his suitcase with a great heave of the shoulder—God knew what was inside. He wrenched open the door, turned and looked at the lot of them, and then gently backed down into the outdoors.

Only to reappear. He had mistaken the station after all. But he simply held his ground there in the doorway, brazening it out as the train darted on.

“I may decide on raising my own birds some day,” he said in a somewhat louder voice. “What did you begin with, a cock and a hen?”

On the index finger which the man from Connemara raised before he answered was a black fingernail, like the mark of a hammer blow; it might have been a reminder not to do something or other before he got home to Ireland.

“I would advise you to begin with a cock and two hens. Don’t go into it without getting advice.”

“What did you start with?”

“Six cocks—”

Another dark station, and down the Welshman dropped.

“And six hens!”

It was almost too much that his face rose there again. He wasn’t embarrassed at himself, any more than he was by how black and all impenetrable it was outside in Wales, and asked, “Do you have to produce a passport to go into Ireland?”

“Certainly, a passport or a travel card. Oh my God.”

“What do you mean by a travel card? Let me see yours. Every one of you carry one with you?”

Travel cards and passports were produced and handed up to him.

“Oh, how beautiful your mother is!” cried the young wife to Victor, over his shoulder. “Is that a wee strawberry mark she has there on her cheek?”

“’Tis!” he cried in agony.

The Welshman was holding the American’s different-looking passport open in his hand; she looked startled, herself, that’she had given it up and at once, as if this were required and he had waked her up in the night. He read out her name, nationality, age, her husband’s name, nationality. It was not that he read it officially—worse: as if it were a poem in the paper, only with the last verse missing.

“My husband is a photographer. We’ve made a little darkroom in our flat,” she told him.

But he all at once turned back and asked the man from Connemara, “And you give it as your opinion your prize bird died of longings for food from far away.”