As I came to the lower end of the field on the way to the railway station, nine drummers stood drumming in a row. All the exasperation of those seven years of British half-measures had passed into those eighteen arms, into the swelling veins of those wrists, into the eighteen hands which grasped the long canes that whipped so passionately the eighteen great parchment drumheads. Nine Popes writhed in those drums as eighteen canes beat on and on and on, lest if they stopped a moment His Holiness would step from out the Vatican, his triple crown upon his head, and hearing of Britain’s apostasy and Ulster’s loneliness, would then and there put out a hand, and gather every Orangeman upon that green to Rome. CHAPTER XXVII TRUCE Now that an armistice had been signed, and Dublin was again the centre of affairs, my wife and I packed up at the end of the Orange celebrations and returned home. We arrived in the middle of another blazing hot day, and as we rattled from the station on a jaunting-car, Crossley tenders full of unarmed Auxiliaries with towels about their necks passed us, going in the direction of the sea. It was an astonishing sight, and more eloquent than all the newspaper accounts. There had been no public rejoicings to speak of at the turn of affairs. For a night or two fires had been lighted in the streets, and small boys had danced round them, and the public had shown a reluctance to go indoors and to bed; but the late hours were little more than an expression of the people’s satisfaction at the liberty which had followed the lifting of the Curfew. Irishmen and the British troops in Ireland took the cessation of hostilities in a sober spirit, as if every man carried a hidden sorrow. The gods had humbled all alike and given victory to none. But though soldier and civilian both felt something of the melancholy that follows the cessation of all protracted trials, public satisfaction at the new conditions was undeniable, and as the truce continued opinions were expressed with a freedom unknown during the reign of terror. It was evident the man in the street had longed for stable conditions, and was eager to accept the compromise which had been effected. Republican leaders who had managed to elude capture to the end had come down from the Olympian heights. They had magically materialised, and might be seen in the streets rubbing shoulders with common men, dining in restaurants off forks that previously had gone into common mouths, wiping their lips with napkins that before had known less glorious patrons. They were joined soon by such deputies of Dail Eireann as had been in prison and in internment camps, and were unconditionally released for the furtherance of the negotiations.