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Updated: June 2, 2025
There was a sense of security in the sound of his father's wooden shoes up and down the foddering-passage. Out of the open half-doors of the smaller outbuildings there came a steamy warmth that smelt pleasantly of calves and pigs. The pigs were hard at work. All through the long sty there was munching and smacking.
In Holborn there is always a hansom to be got at short notice. "Grosvenor Crescent," says Tom, shutting the half-doors with a bang, and shouting his orders through the little hole in the top. So to Grosvenor Crescent he is forwarded accordingly, at the utmost speed attainable by a pair of high wheels, a well-bred "screw," and a rough-looking driver with a flower in his mouth.
Having found refuge they looked out over the half-doors as the car passed, their eyes sparkling, humorous, full of an alert inquisitiveness, their faces fresh as the wind. A group of people swung along the road, speaking volubly in Irish, giving one the impression that they had made a great journey across the range of hills. They gave us a salutation that was also a blessing.
The houses on either side were, for the most part, dingy-looking edifices, with half-doors, and such pretensions to being shops as the display of a quart of meal, salt, or string of red peppers confers. A more wretched, gloomy-looking picture of woe-begone poverty one seldom beheld. It was no better if they turned for consolation to the rear of the house.
Wasted nature, blanched and despairing, ferments here into one terrible pool. Women in gaudy-colored dresses, their bared breasts and brawny arms contrasting curiously with their wicked faces, hang lasciviously over "half-doors," taunt the dreamy policeman on his round, and beckon the unwary stranger into their dens.
The house into which the door had opened was destroyed; possibly those who once had entered by it also were destroyed, and it now swung in air with men crawling like rats below it, its half-doors banging and groaning; the wind, with ghostly fingers, opening them to no one, closing them on nothing.
The peasant women stood at the half-doors, the men stood here and there. The lovely smell there was in the wintry air: the smell of Clane: rain and wintry air and turf smouldering and corduroy. The train was full of fellows: a long long chocolate train with cream facings. The guards went to and fro opening, closing, locking, unlocking the doors.
As she rode beneath the arch a number of dogs yelped a welcome from kennels or behind stable half-doors, and a bent old man, dressed like something between a stableman and a butler, came forward, touching his forehead, to take her horse.
Specially was it provided with one of those half-doors now so rarely met with, which are to whole doors as spencers worn by old folk are to coats. They speak of limited commerce united with a social or observing disposition on the part of the shopkeeper, allowing, as they do, talk with passers-by, yet keeping off such as have not the excuse of business to cross the threshold.
This time, as we passed the same stable-yard, fresh horses looked over the half-doors, the lofts were stuffed with hay; in the corner, against the coming of winter, were piled many cords of wood, and rival chanticleers, with their harems, were stalking proudly around the stable-yard, pecking at the scattered grain. It was a picture of comfort and content. It continued like that all the way.
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