“What I notice most about our boys is the way they have aged,” Mrs. Desmond Fitzgerald said to me. “Some of them, who were quite young men at the Rising four years ago, walk and talk like middle-aged men.” I asked Mrs. Fitzgerald how the leaders with a price on their heads kept their nerve day after day, and her answer was they had no time to think of danger because of the work to get through. These people slept in a different house most nights of the week; but all arrangements were made for them, and when they laid down to sleep, be it by night or by day, they knew those round them put their safety first of all things. They knew they were the chosen of a nation, which had lifted them out of obscurity in a few brief years, and this must have been a stout prop to their courage. Nevertheless, I have been assured the life told on the stoutest, for in this warfare, carried on below the surface, it was in the most secure moment a man found himself destroyed. So spring brought rumours of peace, but did not bring peace. Attacks upon the Crown Forces had increased, and though the Republican Volunteers had returned to their old ambushing tactics, having found the open skirmishing too costly, they carried out daring coups now and then, which helped to restore the damage to their reputation caused by their tactics in the cities. Then one day I met a neighbour who told me her greengrocer, one of the I.R.A., had announced that the six weeks to follow were to be the worst weeks of the struggle. Lo! anything might happen to anybody at any moment, and the most obscure citizen might find all in an instant that though the age of chivalry might be dead, the age of romance still existed. One sunny day, when the wind was shaking open the lilacs across the way, a thin stream of smoke curled up into the sky over the river, and the word went round that the Customs House, the most beautiful building in Ireland, was in flames. I turned my steps that way. The wind was high, and there was little hope for the building. I came in good time to the shabby streets, which have an end upon the quays. The stream of smoke was rolling up, filling all one part of the sky. I judged the building must be in its death throes. At last, through a gap in the streets, I saw the Customs House straight before me on the other side of the river, and on the quays on this side all the world had gathered. When I emerged from my dive into the mean streets, I came against a wedge of several thousand people. They were from all parts of the city; but swallowing up all the others were the denizens of this slum quarter.