At length Norah Connolly and her sister came to see me. They told me of their father's last hours; how, because of his wound that already had brought him close to death, he had to be strapped into a chair to face the firing-squad. I thought of gentle Mrs. Connolly saying good-by to her husband, knowing all the while what was about to take place! Some of the first-aid girls who had been in prison for fifteen days came to visit me, too. We compared notes. I learned then how Chris Caffrey had been stripped and searched by British soldiers to her shame, for she was a modest girl. But she had eaten her despatch before they dragged her off the street where she had been bicycling. I heard, too, how Chris had been almost prevented from reaching headquarters by a crowd of poor women gathered about the post-office for their usual weekly "separation allowance." Their husbands were all fighting in France or Flanders for the British. They would not get their allowance this week, and were terror-stricken, crowding about the post-office and crying and shouting hysterically. Chris, as we called Christine, had to fire her revolver at the ground before they would make way for her. Next followed the story of Francis Sheehy Skeffington, one of the few men in Dublin we could go to for advice about the law when we had any plan to carry out. He had been shot without a trial, they said; without even knowing, when called out into the little courtyard, that he was about to be killed. And he had had _nothing to do with the rising_! He always had been against the use of force. When he was arrested, after a day spent in trying to get a committee of safety together because the police had disappeared, his wife did not even know where he was. She had no word of his death until a day after he was buried in quicklime, the burial of a criminal! Ah, how the stories of Belgian atrocities which we had heard from the lips of the Archbishop of Michlin when the Great War broke out, paled beside this one fortnight in Dublin! We did not know when it would end or how. There ensued a reign of terror in all Irish homes, whether the men or women had had anything to do with the rising or not. For both soldiers and police were now given power to arrest any one they pleased. Several hundred men were put in prison under no charge, nor were any charges ever preferred in many cases.