Some of the streets I had to ride through were as quiet and peaceful as if there was no thought of revolution in Dublin, but in others I could hear now and then scattered shots from around some corner. It was more than likely that snipers were trying to hold up a force of British on their way to attack one of our main positions. Sometimes I would hear the rattle of a machine-gun, and this warned me that I was approaching a house where the enemy was raking a position held by our men. Generally, however, it was the complete and death-like emptiness of a street that warned me I was close to a scene of hot fighting. This was not always so, for there were times when the curiosity of the crowd got the better of its caution, and it would push dangerously near the shooting. Several days elapsed before the people of Dublin became fully aware of the meaning of what was going on. Riots are not rare, and this might well seem to many of them only rioting on a large scale, with some new and interesting features. The poor of Dublin have never been appeased with bread or circuses by the British authorities. They have had to be content with starvation and an occasional street disturbance. But little by little, as I rode along, I could detect a change in attitude. Some became craven and disappeared; in others, it seemed that at last their souls might come out of hiding and face the day. The spirit at the post-office was always the same--quiet, cheerful, and energetic. I used to stand at the head of the great central staircase waiting for answers to my despatches and could see the leaders as they went to and fro through the corridor. Padraic Pearse impressed me by his natural air of command. He was serious, but not troubled, not even when he had to ask for men from the Citizen Army to eke out the scant numbers of his Volunteers for some expedition. No one had thought it would be that way, for the Volunteers were originally two to one compared with the Citizen Army. Recruits were coming in every day, but at the most there were not fifteen hundred men against twenty thousand British soldiers stationed in or near Dublin. Whenever there came a lull in business or fighting, the men would begin to sing either rebel songs or those old lays dear to Irishmen the world over. And sometimes they knelt in prayer, Protestants and Catholics side by side. From the very beginning there was a sense of the religious character in what we were doing. This song and prayer at the post-office were all natural, devoid of self-consciousness. A gay song would follow a solemn prayer, and somehow was not out of harmony with it. One source of inspiration at the post-office was "old Tom Clarke," who had served fifteen years for taking part in the rising of sixty-seven. His pale, worn face showed the havoc wrought by that long term in an English prison, but his spirit had not been broken.