uld just see the Republican flag floating from the flagstaff on the
roof of the College of Surgeons. "They're still there, then!" And while
he sat looking at it, he heard the sound of some one, wearing heavy
boots, coming down the streets, making loud clattering echoes in the
silence. "That's funny!" he said. "People are going about already.
Perhaps it's over ... practically over!..."

He got out of bed, and as he did so, he heard the sharp rattle of
rifles, and when the echo of it had ceased, he could not hear the noise
of heavy treading any more. He stood still in the centre of the room,
listening, and presently he heard a groan. He ran to the window and
looked out. In the roadway, beneath him, an old man was lying on his
back, groaning very faintly.

"They've killed him!" Henry murmured, glancing across the road at the
hotel, from which the sound of firing had come. "They didn't challenge
him ... they just shot him!"

Four times, the old man groaned, and then he died. He was lying in the
attitude of a young child asleep. One leg was outstretched and the other
was lightly raised. His right arm was lying straight out from his body,
and the hand was turned up and hollowed. Very easy and natural was his
attitude, lying there in the morning light. He looked like a labourer.
"Going to his work," I suppose. "Thinking little of the rebellion. Just
stumping along to his job ... and then!..."

There was a bundle lying by his side, a red handkerchief that seemed to
be holding food ... and flowing towards it, trickling, so slowly did it
move, from his body was a little red dribble....

Henry looked at him with a feeling of curiosity and pity. He had never
seen a man killed before. He had never seen any dead person, not even
Mrs. Clutters, until his father died. He had purposely avoided seeing
Mrs. Clutters' body ... something in the thought of death repelled him
and made him reluctant to look at a corpse, and so, when he had been
asked if he would like to see Mrs. Clutters, he had made some evasive
reply. It had been different when his father died. He had looked on him,
not as a dead man, but as his father, still, even in death, his father,
able to love and be loved. When he thought of death, he thought, not of
Mr. Quinn, but of Mrs. Clutters, and always it seemed to him that the
dead were frightful.... But this old man, a few moments ago intent on
getting to his work in time, and now, cognisant, perhaps of all the
mysterie