nothing to be done with them
or with the people in them. They were decaying together, and the sooner
they decayed, the better would it be for Ireland. All his counsels that
day were counsels of despair. What was the good of working and building
when this was the material out of which a nation must be made? What was
the good of trying to make sure foundations when impatient,
undisciplined people like John Marsh came and threw one's work to the
ground? Was it not better that every Irishman of alert and vigorous mind
should leave Ireland to rot, and choose another country where men had
stability of mind and purpose?...

"But one must go on trying. If the house be pulled down, we must build
it up again. One must go on trying...."

He would get his friends together, and they would plan to save what they
could from the wreckage. "And then we'll begin again! Whatever happens,
we must begin again!"

He was tired of playing Patience, tired of reading, and tired of
sitting still. Perhaps, he thought, he could write. It would be odd
afterwards to think that he had written a story during a rebellion.
There was a great German ... who was it? ... Heine or Goethe?... Oh, why
couldn't he remember names!... who had gone on writing steadily, though
there was battle all about him.... He settled himself to write, though
he had no plan in his mind, and as he wrote, he felt that the story,
whatever it might grow to be, must be comic. "I feel like a clown making
jokes in the circus while his wife is dying," he said to himself....

But his restlessness persisted, and after a while he put his manuscript
aside, and took up a book which he had found in the bookcase: William
James's _Pragmatism_: and began to read it. He remembered a discussion
of Pragmatism by the Improved Tories, when Gilbert had described a
pragmatist as an unfrocked Jesuit....

And while he was burrowing into the first chapter, thinking more of
James's graceful style than of his matter, there was a great rattle, an
incessant hammer-and-rasp noise in the street.

"Good God!" he exclaimed, jumping up and dropping the book, "what's
that?"

Then it ceased, and there was a horrible quietness for a few moments,
followed by the crack-crack of rifles, and then again the
ra-ra-ra-rat-rat-rat-rattle-rattle....

"Machine guns!" he exclaimed. He knew instinctively that they were
machine guns. "It ... it startles you, that noise!"

It went on, rattling, with little pauses now a