irs, tables, desks, sofas, beds, and all kinds of furniture and
stores.

In one place, "Kelly's" of Abbey Street, hundreds of cycles and motor
cycles were piled up--at least five thousand pounds' worth--and
brand-new motor-cars were then run into it, thus forming a steel wall of
solid machinery, upon which, later in the "war," the rebels poured
petrol and set the whole pile alight, with the result that the
neighbouring houses, hotels, and eventually the Hibernian Academy, with
its five hundred pictures, were burnt to the ground.

As the early hours of the morning approached the crowd began to
disperse, the most enthusiastic singing the latest music-hall songs, and
soon O'Connell Street became black and deserted, save for a few specks
of candlelight moving about in the G.P.O., which was otherwise in
complete darkness, and a few guards marching up and down beneath the
great Greek portico.

We retired then to our own room to watch and think. Never to my dying
day shall I ever forget those long hours of midnight stillness, broken
only by the distant rattle of the rifles in the direction of Phoenix
Park, where the two forces had by this time come into contact.

One could easily distinguish the crack of the respective rifles: the
Government weapons had a harsher and lower note, but for each "spit" of
the rebel guns one could hear the dread rattle of the military machine
guns; and then we knew that there could only be one possible
end--defeat, ignominious and complete.

Before us, hardly fifty yards away, stood the Post Office, lit up by the
street arc lamps in pale blues and greens, and looking for all the world
like the drop-cloth of a theatre; and there were we, it might have been
the dress circle of some gigantic opera house, and the feeling--the
feeling was excruciatingly morbid. We felt like cynical critics sent to
review a drama foredoomed to fiasco, yet with the difference that the
actors were all real and that the tragedy would be enacted in the blood
of hundreds of innocent lives.

We were watching the climax of years of planning and the culminating
point of so many lifetimes of idealism, effort, and sacrifice, however
mistaken.

We knew they would fail: we knew the penalty of the failure--the
traitor's death or the convict's cell; but we were held to the spot, to
see just how "dramatic" the fiasco would be.

The very thought was a continuous torture, and it haunted us like a
ghost or a madness.

We knew