in the neighbourhood. He lives on one
side of the court house. The parish priest lives on the other. You
must grasp these facts in order to understand the subsequent military
operations. The only other thing you really must know is that Ballymahon
lies in a hole with hills all round it, like the rim of a saucer. Well,
on Monday afternoon, Easter Monday, the enemy, that is to say, the
Sinn Feiners, marched in and took possession of the town. It was a most
imposing sight, Waterhouse. There were at least eight hundred of them.
Lots of them had uniforms. Most of them had flags. There were two bands
and quite a lot of rifles. The cavalry----"

"You can't expect me to believe in the cavalry," said Waterhouse. ''But
I say, supposing they really came, didn't the loyal inhabitants put up
any kind of resistance?"

"My old dad," said Power, "was the only loyal inhabitant, except four
policemen. You couldn't expect four policemen to give battle to a whole
army. They shut themselves up in their barrack and stayed there. My dad,
being a doctor, was of course a non-combatant I couldn't do anything
with my arm in a sling, so there was no fight at all."

"I suppose the next thing they did was loot the public-houses," said
Waterhouse, "and get gloriously drunk?"

"Certainly not I told you that our war was properly conducted. There was
no looting in Ballymahon and I never saw a drunken man the whole time.
If those Sinn Feiners had a fault it was over-respectability. I shouldn't
care to be in that army myself."

"I believe that," said Waterhouse. "It's the first thing in this story
that I really have believed."

"They used to march about all day in the most orderly manner, and at
night there were sentries at every street corner who challenged you in
Irish. Not knowing the language, I thought it better to stay indoors.
But my dad used to wander about He's a sporting old bird and likes to
know what's going on. Well, that state of things lasted three days and
we all began to settle down comfortably for the summer. Except that
there were no newspapers or letters there wasn't much to complain about.
In fact, you'd hardly have known there was a war on. It wasn't the least
like this beastly country where everyone destroys everything he sees,
and wretched devils have to live in rabbit-holes. In Ballymahon we lived
in houses with beds and chairs and looked after ourselves properly.
Then one morning--it must have been Friday--news came in that