At the end of the second book of The Aran Islands, John Millington Synge goes on a train journey from Galway to Dublin. His departure occurs on the eve of a celebration in Dublin of the life of Charles Stewart Parnell, the fallen Irish political leader. Synge's train is full of excursionists to Dublin, and many of them are in a festive mood. ‘A wild crowd was on the platform, surging round the train in every stage of intoxication’, writes Synge, who describes the scene as evidence of the ‘half-savage temperament of Connaught’. Synge is not altogether disapproving of the crowd's high spirits, stating that ‘the tension of human excitement seemed greater in this insignificant crowd than anything I have felt among enormous mobs in Rome or Paris’ (122).

As the train pulls away, Synge takes his seat in the third-class carriage amongst people he has come to know from the Aran Islands, and finds himself sitting beside a shy young girl. The journey proves raucous:

That excitement culminates in a brawl at Ballinasloe station (the easternmost station in County Galway), when a sailor on the train has a fight with a soldier who is trying to board. ‘Peace was made’, writes Synge, but as the soldiers leave the train:

As the journey progresses through the night, the mood calms – but Synge is unable to sleep, kept awake by the jokes of the sailor, and by the conversation in Irish of two old men sitting nearby.