The rule that the convert makes the fiercest apostle held good in the case of these two--of Mrs. Childers, an American citizen, and of Childers, the Englishman, who in earlier years had served Britain and the British Empire in the army and the navy. The nationality of Mrs. Childers, and the fact that she was a person of breeding in a movement where most of the followers belonged to the people, made her valuable, and all wandering strangers whose sympathy it was desirable to enlist, were taken along to her with the words, “Oh, you must see Mrs. Erskine Childers. She can tell you so much.” Mrs. Childers, refined, daintily dressed, intellectual, lying on her couch, put them right upon the wrongs of Ireland. The strangest of the birds of passage that passed through Ireland during these troubled times were Americans, who, one and all, belied their national reputation for shrewdness. Those I came across in Ireland were emotional, simple individuals, ready to credit any well-told story. What of Childers himself, the toiling Childers, the small harassed man, for ever pedalling his bicycle; Childers who, of all those hard-working people, outworked all others; Childers who looked as though he might die and still sit upon his bicycle with his legs going round and round? This toiling Republican, whom the British Government in the strangeness of its ways left free, was he a man with a broken heart, and this very fever of work the effort to escape his sorrow? Was there truth in the whisper that he was a disappointed English naval man, who in pique had thrown himself into Irish affairs? Then, indeed, he was a small man, and all his furious pedalling would never bring him balm. But if his work for Ireland represented truth to him, so that no doubt ever came to make him irresolute, so that he never thought hungrily of his own country which he had forsaken then, indeed, he was bigger than the common run of man, and his toil may have brought repose to his spirit. Mrs. Desmond Fitzgerald had a cottage in the hills, not very far from the city. We made occasional pilgrimages there. The two-mile walk from the station was nothing on those first kind summer days. There were pools of shade for the traveller to wade through under the trees; the lower lands were golden with gorse; the sky was high and serene. Yet the country bore more marks of ruin than the city.