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that was made almost ridiculous by the bandoleers and the long, obsolete bayonets and the heavy, out-of-date rifles they carried. The mind, remembering tales of France and Flanders and the Dardanelles, of guns that fired shells a ton in weight for many miles, of an extraordinary complicity of invention whereby men may be slain by men who have never seen them— the mind, remembering these things, found something supremely comical in the spectacle of young clerks and middle-aged laborers steeling their hearts and fitting their bodies with the worn-out implements of war in the hope that they might so disturb the British race that all they desired would instantly be conceded to them.

It is easy now to pitch blame on Mr. Birrell and to say that he should have known this and that he should have known the other; but I doubt whether many men, seeing the procession of volunteers on St. Patrick's day, would have felt any alarm. At most, one imagined, there would be a brawl in the streets, quickly and easily suppressed by a little force of police.

Such was my mood on Easter Sunday when, coming away from the Abbey Theater, I encountered, on Eden Quay, a company of volunteers marching toward Liberty Hall. They had been, I think, in the mountains all day, drilling and marching, and now, tired and hungry, were nearly at the end of the day's work, in a moment or two to be disbanded for the night. They were just such a company of men and boys as had been accustomed for months past to see parading about the streets: middle-aged, spare-looking laborers in whom the brutalities of the 1911 strike had left deep bitterness; young clerks and shop assistants and schoolteachers, full of generous ideals and emotions that were unchecked by the discipline of wide knowledge and experience; and boys, vaguely idealistic and largely thrilled by the desire for romantic enterprise and the hope of high happenings. And with them, as intent and eager as the men, were a few women and little girls.

I stood on the pavement to watch them

go by. The captain of the company was a man I had known slightly, a modest, quiet, kindly man of honest desires, called Sean Connolly, unrelated, save in the comradeship of arms, to James Connolly. I nodded to him, and he waved his hand to me. The next day he was dead, killed in the street fighting for some ideal that dominated and bound his mind. I remember, too, seeing the Countess Marckevitz in the ranks that Sean Connolly commanded. I had met her twice very casually and did not recognize her in the halflight of the evening, but some one standing by said, "That 's the countess," and I looked, and saw a tired woman who would never admit that she was tired, stumping heavily by in a green uniform, oblivious of the comments, many of them of mockery, that the onlookers were making.

It is not my business here to explain the rebellion or to describe the causes of it. An adequate explanation would fill too much space, and the causes of it were varied. Some of the volunteers were men belonging to the citizen army which had been formed in 1911 by James Larkin and James Connolly and Captain White, the son of Sir George White, the defender of Ladysmith, during what was probably the most brutally conducted strike (on the part of the employers) in the history of industrial disorder. I have no knowledge of what was in these men's minds, but I do not doubt that the rebellion meant to them less of an opportunity to establish an Irish republic than an opportunity to avenge their outraged humanity. Others were men who remembered, no doubt, that the gun-running practised by their side was treated with a severity that ended in death, whereas the gun-running practised by the followers of Sir Edward Carson was treated as an admirable exploit. Others, again, and these were the majority, were men who loved Ireland and sought to set her free. If one were to set out to apportion blame for the rebellion, one would find that it must be distributed over so many people that in the end one could only say, "We are all to

24
blame; we Irish people, old and young,
are all at fault."

But while one does not set out to ex-
plore the causes of the rebellion, one may
briefly say that the origin of the volun-
teers lay in the necessity which some Irish-
men felt for an effective defense against
the volunteers who had been created in
The ex-
Ulster by Sir Edward Carson.
tent of that necessity was made plain
when what is called the Curragh Camp
incident happened. On that occasion a
number of officers refused to obey an or-
der (so it is said) to proceed to Belfast
and keep the Unionist volunteers in con-
trol. I do not believe that any reputable
Irishmen wished to see the Ulster volun-
teers terrorized or put to death by British
soldiers; but the incident set a number of
Nationalists wondering what sort of de-
fense they would have if the Ulster vol-
unteers made an attack on them. The
temper of the soldiers at the Curragh in-
dicated that they could hope for little help
from that quarter, and there was no other
defense, apart from the police. So they
set up volunteers of their own, under the
leadership of John McNeill, a professor
at the National University. The purpose
of these volunteers was, first, to defend
themselves against attack, and, secondly, to
make a display of force if Home Rule was
not conceded to Ireland. After the out-
break of the war this purpose was ex-
tended to prevent the imposition of con-
scription on the Irish people.

The reader, remembering these pur-
poses of the volunteers, may now wonder
why the rebellion took place, seeing that
an attack on the Nationalists was not
made by the Ulster volunteers, that Home
Rule had in law been conceded to Ire-
land, and that the Irish people were ex-
pressly excluded from the scope of the
Military Service Act. The answer
such speculation is that the great m
of the Irish volunteers firmly
that the Home Rule A

nulled after the war
vinced that the Lib

quit office on the co
be succeeded by a

ment, which would make as little of the
Home Rule Act as the Germans made of
the treaty guaranteeing the neutrality of
Belgium; and they were confirmed in this
belief by the tone of an obstinate English
A further factor was the
newspaper.
treatment of the Irish regiments in Gal-
lipoli, where, although they bore the brunt
of the fighting, they were disregarded by
the commanders in a thoroughly incom-
prehensible manner. One of the strange
features of the Gallipoli campaign is the
fact that Admiral de Robeck forgot to
mention the names of the Irish regiments
which took heroic part in landing on the
peninsula, although he remembered to
mention the names of all the other regi-
ments concerned in it!

The causes, then, which led up to the rebellion were many and varied, but the dominant cause was this suspicion that once again the English Government was about to betray the Irish people. I belong to a school of Irish Home-Rulers who believe that the destinies of Ireland and England in the world are as inseparable as the waters of the Liffey and the Mersey in the Irish Sea, and I do not believe that these suspicions of English perfidy were justified; but I can readily understand why men of an impatient temperament, in whose minds the wrongs of their country had made an indelible impression, were quick to suspect treachery where they should have seen only the petulance of irresponsible and impotent politicians and journalists.

WHEN the history of the Irish rebellion is written I suppose people will notice particularly how completely it surprised

every one, even the officials who had fears of its happening. I do not imagine that any of that company of volunteers whom

on Easter Sunday evening had the dea that there was to be a rethe following morning. I know Countess Marckevitz was not the proposed outbreak until it zan, and I know of one volunnot know of what was about heard the sound of

[graphic]

Copyright by Brown and Dawson from Underwood and Underwood

Sir Roger Casement, who was hanged in August for his part in the rebellion

rifle-fire. It is obvious that the strictest secrecy as to intention had to be preserved, otherwise the plan would have been betrayed. A secret which is committed to several thousand persons ceases to be a secret. The Irish secret service knew that a rising had been planned, but they did not suspect that it would take place so soon. Indeed, at the very moment when the rebellion began a council was actually being held in Dublin Castle to determine

what steps should be taken to cope with the insurrection when it took place. The secret service, I understand, expected the attempt at rising to be made on Whit Monday. The result was a state of unpreparedness that is almost incredible. General Friend, who was in charge of the troops in Ireland, had left the country on Easter Saturday, and was in England when he heard the news of the outbreak. The lord lieutenant had arranged to pay

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So she was carrying it off, and her smile only a little self-conscious, only a shade embarrassed, when from among the men standing near the library door, for which she was directly making, there stepped out one to meet her, not unlike a slender needle darting toward a rounded magnet as it comes into due range.

More sensitive than she, feeling the situation much more uncomfortably for his countrywoman than she felt it for herself, a foreign-looking fellow, who had not quite forgotten that he was an American, after a moment's hard struggle against his impulse hastened forward to shorten for her that uncompanioned course across the floor under ten thousand search-lights.

"I'm looking for somebody," said Mrs. Hawthorne, with the smile of a child.

The voice which had made one man think of the crimson heart on a valentine reminded this other of rough velvet.

He showed his eccentric three front teeth in a responding smile that had a touch of the faun, and asked whimsically: "Will I do?"

"Help me to find Mr. Foss, and you'll do perfectly," she said merrily. "I have n't seen him more than just to shake hands to shake hands this whole evening, and I do want to have a little talk before I go."

"If I am not mistaken, we shall find him in the library." He offered his arm.

"I may have appeared to be doing something else, Mrs. Hawthorne, but I have really been looking for you the last hour," said the consul when he had been found. "I wanted to have a little talk. How are you enjoying Florence?"

"Oh, we 're having an elegant time, thanks to that dear wife of yours and that dear girl, Leslie. I don't know what we should have done without them and you." "But the city itself, Florence, does n't it enchant you?"

"We-ell, yes. N-n-n-no. Yes and no. That's it. You want me to tell the truth, don't you? Some of it does, and some of it does n't. Some of it, I guess, will take me a long time to get used to. It 's terribly different from what we ex

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"Mrs. Hawthorne, hear me prophesy," said Mr. Foss. "In six months you will love it all. It 's the fate of us who come here from new countries. It will steal in upon you, grow upon you, beset and besot you, till you like no other place in the world so well."

"Will it? Well, if you say so. The judge the friend I was speaking ofsaid so much of the same kind that the minute I thought of coming to Europe, right after I'd said, 'I 'll go to Paris,' I said to myself, 'I 'll go to Florence.'"

"Mrs. Hawthorne, we must take you in hand. Be it ours to initiate you. Come, what have you been to see?"

"Treasures of art? We have n't had time yet. We 've been getting a house fit to live in. When you asked me how I liked Florence, I ought to have begun by that end. I love my house, Mr. Foss. I love my garden. I love the Lungarno. And the Casheeny. And Boboly. And the drive up here. And the stores! I positively dote on those little bits of stores. on the jeweler's bridge."

"Well, well, that 's quite enough to begin with."

"Now that we 're going to have some time to spare, we mean to go sight-seeing like other folks."

"How I wish, dear Mrs. Hawthorne, that I were not such a busy man! But-" Mr. Foss had a look of bright inspiration -"should I on that account be dejected? Here is Mr. Fane-"

He turned to Gerald, who, after bringing up Mrs. Hawthorne, had stood near, a silent third, waiting to act further as her escort by and by. Meanwhile he had been listening with a varied assortment of feelings and a boundless fatigue of spirit.

"Mr. Fane," said the consul, "who is not nearly so busy a man as I, and is the

most sympathetic, well-informed cicerone

you

could find. When we wish to be sure our visiting friends shall see Florence under the best possible circumstances, we turn them over to Mr. Fane."

Gerald's face struggled into a sourish smile, and he bowed ironical thanks for the compliment. Lifting his head, he shot a glance of reproachful interrogation at the consul. Was his friend doing this humorously, to tease him, or was the man simply not thinking?

The consul looked innocent of any sly intention; he was all of a jocund smile; the consul, who should have known better, wore the air of doing him a pleasure and her a pleasure and a pleasure to himself; the air of thinking that any normally constituted young man would be grateful for such a chance.

"I shall be most happy," said Gerald, with irreproachable and misleading polite

ness.

Mrs. Hawthorne turned to him readily. "Any time you say. Let me tell you where we live."

CHAPTER IV

THE room in which Mrs. Hawthorne went to bed an hour or two after taking leave of the dwindling company at Villa Foss was large and luxurious. Its windows were enormous, arched at the top and reaching the floor. A wrought-iron railing outside made them safe. In the angle of the wall between two of them—it was a corner room-stood a mirror nearly the size of the windows, in a broad frame of carved and gilt wood, resting on a marble shelf that supported besides two alabaster vases holding bunches of roses.

In the corner opposite to the mirror and placed "catty-corner," as the occupier worded it, stood the stateliest of beds, upholstered and draped in heavy watered silk of a dull, even dingy, yellow. Its hangings were gathered at the top into the hollow of a great gold coronet, whence they spread and fell in folds that were looped back with silk cords. The walls were covered by that same texture

of dull gold, held in place by tarnished gilt mouldings.

Mrs. Hawthorne had wanted all this dusty and faded splendor removed, -it seemed to her the possible lurking-place of mice or worse,-but the agent would not hear of it. The noble landlord was not really eager to let.

So Mrs. Hawthorne, to brighten the room despite it, for she wished to keep it for her own, having taken a fancy to the fresco overhead, -that fascinating chariot driven among clouds by a radiant youth surrounded by smiling, flower-scattering maidens, Mrs. Hawthorne to "gay up" the room, as she said, had hung windows and doors with draperies of her favorite corn-flower blue, and covered the chairs with the same. On the floor she had stretched a pearl-gray carpet all aglow with wreaths of roses tied with ribbons of blue; and over the carpet-at the bedside, before the dressing-table, in front of the fireplace-laid down white bearskins.

To cover further the yellow silk, she had hung in one panel of it a painting of the "Madonna della Seggiola," in another, Carlo Dolci's "Angel of the Annunciation," and in another, Carlo Dolci's Magdalen clasping the box of ointmentall works of art bought in Via dei Fossi, in great gilt-wood frames, like the mirror.

There was just one thing in all the room that looked poor, workaday. It was on the small table at the head of the bed, beside the candlestick and match-safe, a black book, the commonest kind of Bible, such a Bible as is dispensed by those who have to furnish the sacred writings in large numbers-Sunday-schools, for in

stance.

It was in fact a Sunday-school prize that now lay on the night-stand, in what the sober volume presented to a pious little girl must have thought strange company. Cover to cover with it, cheek by jowl, lay a book on etiquette.

It was for the Bible, however, that Mrs. Hawthorne reached after she had got into bed. She found her place. She read in it every night before sleeping, to keep a promise made long ago, and avoid

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