to myself, "They have smashed through the walls with a hatchet and
are sitting in the next house, or they have long ago climbed out by the
skylight and are on a roof half a block away." Then the thought came to
me--they have and hold the entire of Sackville Street down to the Post
Office. Later on this proved to be the case, and I knew at this moment
that Sackville Street was doomed.

I continued to watch the bombardment, but no longer with the anguish
which had before torn me. Near by there were four men, and a few yards
away, clustered in a laneway, there were a dozen others. An agitated
girl was striding from the farther group to the one in which I was, and
she addressed the men in the most obscene language which I have ever
heard. She addressed them man by man, and she continued to speak and cry
and scream at them with all that obstinate, angry patience of which only
a woman is capable.

She cursed us all. She called down diseases on every human being in the
world excepting only the men who were being bombarded. She demanded of
the folk in the laneway that they should march at least into the roadway
and prove that they were proud men and were not afraid of bullets. She
had been herself into the danger zone. Had stood herself in the track of
the guns, and had there cursed her fill for half an hour, and she
desired that the men should do at least what she had done.

This girl was quite young--about nineteen years of age--and was dressed
in the customary shawl and apron of her class. Her face was rather
pretty, or it had that pretty slenderness and softness of outline which
belong to youth. But every sentence she spoke contained half a dozen
indecent words. Alas, it was only that her vocabulary was not equal to
her emotions, and she did not know how to be emphatic without being
obscene--it is the cause of most of the meaningless swearing one hears
every day. She spoke to me for a minute, and her eyes were as soft as
those of a kitten and her language was as gentle as her eyes. She wanted
a match to light a cigarette, but I had none, and said that I also
wanted one. In a few minutes she brought me a match, and then she
recommenced her tireless weaving of six vile words into hundreds of
stupid sentences.

About five o'clock the guns eased off of Kelly's.

To inexperienced eyes they did not seem to have done very much damage,
but afterwards one found that although the walls were standing and
apparently solid there wa