this Insurrection is being fought, and one
imagines what must be the feeling of these men, young for the most part,
and unused to violence, who are submitting silently to the crash and
flame and explosion by which they are surrounded.

CHAPTER V.

FRIDAY.

This morning there are no newspapers, no bread, no milk, no news. The
sun is shining, and the streets are lively but discreet. All people
continue to talk to one another without distinction of class, but nobody
knows what any person thinks.

It is a little singular the number of people who are smiling. I fancy
they were listening to the guns last night, and they are smiling this
morning because the darkness is past, and because the sun is shining,
and because they can move their limbs in space, and may talk without
having to sink their voices to a whisper. Guns do not sound so bad in
the day as they do at night, and no person can feel lonely while the sun
shines.

The men are smiling, but the women laugh, and their laughter does not
displease, for whatever women do in whatever circumstances appears to
have a rightness of its own. It seems right that they should scream
when danger to themselves is imminent, and it seems right that they
should laugh when the danger only threatens others.

It is rumoured this morning that Sackville Street has been burned out
and levelled to the ground. It is said that the end is in sight; and, it
is said, that matters are, if anything rather worse than better. That
the Volunteers have sallied from some of their strongholds and
entrenched themselves, and that in one place alone (the South Lotts)
they have seven machine guns. That when the houses which they held
became untenable they rushed out and seized other houses, and that,
pursuing these tactics, there seemed no reason to believe that the
Insurrection would ever come to an end. That the streets are filled with
Volunteers in plain clothes, but having revolvers in their pockets. That
the streets are filled with soldiers equally revolvered and plain
clothed, and that the least one says on any subject the less one would
have to answer for.

The feeling that I tapped was definitely Anti-Volunteer, but the number
of people who would speak was few, and one regarded the noncommital
folk who were so smiling and polite, and so prepared to talk, with much
curiosity, seeking to read in their eyes, in their bearing, even in the
cut of their clothe