ond's son--who was for a long time refused a commission in the
Division in whose formation his father had played so great a part.

Naturally, trained speakers who had joined the Division were utilized
for recruiting purposes. Willie Redmond did comparatively little of this
work. It is no light job to take over command of a company, if you mean
really to command it; and with him, from the moment he joined everything
came second to his military duty. But private soldiers have a less
exacting time, and there was scarcely one week of my three months in the
7th Leinsters in which I did not spend the Saturday and Sunday on this
business--generally in company with the most brilliant speaker, taking
all in all, that I have ever heard. Kettle, then a lieutenant in the
battalion, was wit, essayist, poet and orator: whether he was most a wit
or most an orator might be argued for a night without conclusion; but as
talker or as speaker he had few equals. He was the son of a veteran
Nationalist, who had taken a lead in Parnell's day; but the farmer's son
had become the most characteristic product of Ireland's capital, which,
rich or poor, squalid or splendid, is a metropolis--a centre of many
interests, a forcing-house of many ideas. Nothing in Ireland is less
English than Dublin, and its tone differs from that of England in having
active sympathy with the continental mind.

Kettle was always to some extent in revolt against the theories of the
Gaelic League, which he thought tended to make Ireland insular morally
as well as materially. He was a good European because he was a good
Irishman; and because he was both, he was, though largely educated in
Germany, a fierce partisan of France.

More than all this, he had seen with his own eyes the actual martyrdom
of Belgium. Sent out by Redmond to purchase rifles, he was in the
country when Antwerp was occupied, and he wrote with passion of what he
heard, of what he saw. Louvain to him was more than a mere name. All the
Catholic in him, and all the Irish Catholic, for Ireland's association
with Louvain was long and intimate, rose up in fury; he went through
Ireland carrying the fiery cross.

Everywhere we went we had friendly and even enthusiastic audiences; the
only place where I met any suggestion of hostility was at Killarney, and
there it took the form of avoiding our meeting. We were cheered and
encouraged--but we did not get many recruits, so to say, on the nail.
Yet they came, ge