ties, instructing pale boys who were acting as sentinels; and when one saw how young they were, there came again into the mind that sense of the ridiculousness of it all, and one thought, "This is all very well, this playing with rebellion and establishing a republic; but wait-just wait until the police catch you at it!" One thought of them as boys who had let their lark run away with their wits. All this joking had gone too far, and presently there would be trouble, and some sorry people would be mumbling excuses to a magistrate. It was as if boys, letting their imaginations feed too fat on penny dreadfuls, had forgotten that they were only pretending to be wild Indians attacking Buffalo Bill, and had suddenly scalped a companion or halved his skull with a tomahawk.

"It'll be over when dinner-time comes,' some one said to me. We were all extraordinarily lacking in prescience. We still thought of this thing as a kids' rebellion, a school-boys' escapade. "Silly young asses!" people were saying; "they 'll only get into trouble."

I got tired of hanging about O'Connell Street, and so I went home. At the top of Grafton Street I crossed over to the park, and saw that the gates were closed, and barricaded rather ineffectively. A man was standing inside the gates, holding a rifle, and looking intently down Grafton Street. Some girls were chaffing him, and asking him if he was not scared to death, and what would his mother say if she could see him, and was he not afraid that she would give him a beating. But he paid no heed to their chaff, though now and then, when some one obscured his vision of the street, he gruffly ordered them away and, if they did not move speedily, threatened to shoot them. "G' long with you!" they would say, still chaffing, but a little uncertain. After all, he might shoot.

I walked along the side of the green toward the Shelbourne Hotel. Inside the railings I could see boys digging trenches and throwing up heaps of earth for shelOther boys were stretched on the

turf, with their fingers on the triggers of their rifles, and they, too, like the boys at the post-office, were waiting. I heard a man say to one lad who was digging into the soft earth:

"What in the name of God are you doin' there?" and the lad replied:

"I don't know. I'm supposed to be diggin' a trench, but I think I 'm diggin' my grave."

It is said, and I believe it to be true, that none of these lads knew what was to happen that day. Some of them had come up from the country to take part, they imagined, in an ordinary demonstration, a route march. It is said of some of them who were deputed to capture Westland Row station-their task was not told to them until they had reached the stationthat when they heard what was to be done, they sent for a priest, made their confessions to him, and received the host. They told the priest that they were ignorant until that moment of what was about to take place, and he advised them to drop their rifles and uniforms when dusk came and go to their homes.

"Oh, no," they answered; "we joined this thing, and we ought to go on with it." There was much of that kind of young chivalry that week in Dublin. I doubt whether many of the volunteers funked when the moment came, although they must have felt that they had been led into something like a trap.

At the Shelbourne Hotel there was a barricade across the street, composed of motor-cars and vans that had been taken from their owners by the volunteers. Inside the green there was much movement and hurrying to and fro. At each gate there was a small group of armed sentries, who challenged every vehicle that passed. If the vehicle was found to be above suspicion, it was allowed to pass on. If the driver of it failed to halt when challenged several times, he was fired on.

I went into the house where I was living. It overlooks the green, an bedroom I possibl

little girls who could not have been more than fifteen years of age running busily about. They were members of the Countess Marckevitz's corps of Girl Guides and they were acting as messengers. On the opposite side of the green I could see the tricolor of the republic floating over the College of Surgeons. A man came to see me.

"Will there be a performance at the Abbey to-night?" he said, and I answered:

"I don't know. You'd better turn up, anyhow. Perhaps it will be all over by eight o'clock." I was told later that the D'Oyley Carte Opera Company, who

were to begin a fortnight's engagement at the Gaiety Theater that day, did not abandon their intention until a few minutes before the hour at which the performance was due to begin.

AFTER tea I walked round the park. On one side of the green, near the Unitarian church, there was a pool of congealed blood. I almost sickened at the sight of it. On this spot a second policeman had been murdered. I use the word "murdered" intentionally. It is, I think, true to say that the rebellion was conducted by its leaders as cleanly as it is

possible to conduct any rebellion, and many high and chivalrous things were done by them and their followers. They strove to fight, as closely as they could, in accordance with the laws of civilized warfare. But the killing of these policemen at the castle and the Unitarian church were acts of murder, for these civil servants were unarmed, defenseless, while their opponents carried loaded rifles. I believe, indeed, that much of what we call atrocity in warfare, civil or international, is largely the result of fright and nervous strain, the panic act of men who are "rattled"; and it is very probable that the murder of the policemen was due to an attack of nerves. But whatever the cause of it may have been, it stained a singularly clean record. The behavior of the rebels to their prisoners was exemplary. An old colonel who was in their hands for the better part of a week subsequently stated that he had been treated with exceptional kindness, and a subaltern who was interned in the post-office asserted that his captors were very considerate to him.

It was while I was looking at the pool of congealed blood that I saw Francis Sheehy Skeffington. I had known him fairly well for some time. He was a man of immense energy and vitality. Once he walked from Dublin into Wicklow and back, covering fifty miles in one day. His ⚫ honesty was superlative, and his courage was leonine. I think of him as a man overruled by intellect. He was governed by logic, and he seemed incapable of understanding that life is a wayward thing, that men are moody, that humanity cannot be scheduled or set out in terms of an equation; and this submission of his to intellect robbed him of any capacity to act practically in affairs. Had he been a witty man, he would have resembled Bernard Shaw. But he was not a witty man; he was almost totally devoid of a sense of humor. I think, too, he was completely devoid of any feeling for tradition, any sense of reverence. Once when I was living in a Welsh village I met him. I went with him one day to see a cromlech

outside the village, and when we reached it, he looked at it for a few moments, and then, to my disgust, took a bill out of his pocket and stuck it into a crack in the stones. "I may as well do little propaganda," he said. The bill had "Votes for Women" on it. But when all the small irritations one had in his presence were accounted for, there remained this, that he was a man of great integrity and courage, and men of integrity and courage are so rare in the world that it is a calamity to have lost this man in the miserable way in which he was lost.

He came up to me, and we talked about the rebellion. I was full of anger, because I saw in it the wreck of the slowly maturing plans for the better ordering of Irish life; but his emotion was different.

"I'm against all this fighting," he said. "More and more I am inclining toward the Tolstoian position." He spoke of the rebellion as "folly, but it 's noble folly," and declared that it was a hopeless enterprise. He went off, walking in that habitual quick, nervous way of his, which seemed to indicate that he could never walk with sufficient swiftness. I went home, and sat in the window, looking out on the park and the passing people. The dusk gathered about the trees in the green, and a film of blue mist enveloped us. Behind the College of Surgeons, which faced my side of the green, the setting sun sent shafts of golden light shimmering up the heavens. There was hardly any wind, and the tricolor on the college fluttered listlessly. The evening became quiet. The crowds which had moved about the city all day in a holiday mood, treating the rebellion as a jolly entertainment provided. by benevolent persons for their amusement, had dispersed to their homes, carrying with them not the mood of merriment, but the mood of alarm, of anxious anticipation.

One could hardly have felt otherwise then. All day the rebels had been in possession of the city. The Government seemed to have thrown up the sponge. There was not a policeman to be seen, or

IRISH WAR NEWS

THE IRISH REPUBLIC.

to home hate me

-IF THE GERMANS CONQUERED ENGLAND."

The

a soldier or any person in authority. At ten o'clock that morning there had been a Government and policemen and soldiers; at eleven o'clock all these had disappeared. There was looting in O'Connell Street, some of it extraordinarily ludicrous. There was one looter who had stolen a dress-suit from a shop near O'Connell Bridge. He went into an abandoned tram-car, stripped his rags off, and then put on the dress-suit. When he reappeared, swaggering up and down the street, he was wearing brown boots, a dress-suit, a Panama hat, and he was carrying a lady's sunshade. The rebels tried to prevent looting. I saw them making. the attempts; but their efforts were ineffectual, and all that day (Monday) and all Tuesday the looting went on ridiculously.

Although the Government had mysteriously vanished, and there were no policemen to arrest looters, one did not feel that victory was with the rebels, nor did they themselves think victory was with them. That anxious, waiting look had marked. the rebels' faces all day, and now something of dread came to the larking crowd; and as the night fell, the jokes ceased, the

At

laughter died out, and silence came. seven o'clock the streets were nearly empty. I looked out of my window and saw shadow-shapes moving swiftly homeward, huddling close to the houses. The rebel sentries still guarded the gate of the green which faced toward Merrion Street, and through the gloaming I could detect the figures of boys and women hurrying about their business in the camp. A cab came down the east side of the green, and the sentries challenged the driver; but he would not stop, though they called "Halt!" a dozen times. Then they fired on him. The horse went down instantly, and the driver, abandoning it, leaped from the box of his cab and flew down Merrion Street. The poor beast, sprawling on its haunches, tried to struggle to its feet, but fell back as often as it rose. While it lay there, struggling and kicking, a motor-car came down that side of the green, and the driver of it, too, was challenged, and he, also, refused to halt, and again the sentries fired. I was leaning out of the window to see what happened, and I laughed, for the man who was in the car with the driver yelled out the moment he was hit: "Oh, I'm dead! I'm dead!"

The car stopped suddenly, grating harshly on the roadway, so that one's blood curdled for a few seconds. Then the wounded man was taken out. The sentries gathered round him. "Why did n't you stop when you were told?" they said reproachfully, and added, "Take him to Vincents'," the hospital a little way up the street.

While they were supporting him toward the hospital, the man went on moaning: "Oh, I'm dead! I'm dead!" It was the worst imitation of death I had ever witnessed. They did not take him to Vincents'. They changed their minds, and took him into the green and treated him there. His wound was obviously slight; he could not have yelled so lustily or have walked so well as he did if it had been serious. There was no dignity in him, only a foolish bravado that speedily turned to squealing; and so one laughed at him.

After that there was a queer silence in the green. In the distance one heard occasional rifle-firing, but here there was this ominous quietness. It became difficult to see, and so I closed the shutters; but before I did so, I looked toward the wounded horse. It was lying in the middle of the street and was not making any movement. "Thank God, it 's dead!" I said to myself, and then I drew the shut

ters to.

There was a dreadful feeling of strain in the house, and I moved about restlessly. I got out the manuscript of a play on which I am working and began to revise it, but I could not continue at it long. I tried to read a book by H. G. Wells, called "An Englishman Looks at the World." I had opened it at the chapter entitled "The Common Sense of Warfare," but I found that the war outside proved conclusively that there is no common sense in warfare, so I put the book down and tried to play a game of patience. I played three games, and then I went to bed.

I slept in short dozes that were more exhausting than if I had not slept at all. The desultory rifle-fire had increased during the night, and it seemed to me that

shooting was proceeding from the Shelbourne Hotel. At four o'clock I got up and looked out of the window. I was sleeping in the front of the house, and I had left the shutters of my bedroom open. It was not quite light enough for me, who have poor sight, to distinguish things clearly, but I could see a huddled heap lying in front of the gate where the sentries had been a few hours before. And the horse was not dead. While I looked, it made a feeble struggle to rise, and then fell back again. "Why don't they kill it?" I said to myself, and I went back to bed. But I did not sleep. There were people moving about in the next room, fidgeting and fidgeting. I got up and began to dress, and while I was doing so I heard the sound of heavy boots on the pavement below, echoing oddly in that silence; and then I heard shots, followed by a low moan.

One's mind works in a queer way in moments of unusual happening. I knew that some one had been shot in the street outside my home, and if I had been asked before the thing happened what I should be likely to do, I think I should never have guessed correctly. I stood there counting the dying man's moans. He said, “Oh!” four times, and then he died. I went to the window and looked out. It was now about six o'clock, and I could see plainly. The huddled heap outside the gates of the green was the body of a dead Sinn Feiner. The horse in the roadway. was now quite still. Just off the pavement, in front of the door of my home, lay the body of an old man, a laborer, evidently, who had been stumping to his work. I suppose he had not realized that the rebellion was a serious one, and had started off on the usual routine of his life; and then Death had caught him suddenly and stretched him in the road in a strangely easy attitude.

I came down-stairs, and the maids gave me breakfast, apologizing because there was no milk. It seemed to them that one could not drink tea without milk. These minds of ours are amazing instruments. Outside the door lay the body of an old