“Oh, terrible! Out every night, out all night long, hail and rain and frost. Rushing up stairs, expecting a bullet on every landing. Tearing into terrible slums where men and women and children all sleep in the same bed, and you come away with the itch, and where you have to crawl about with your hand to your nose looking for patriots. And they told me it was money for nothing. And then, in the small hours, you stagger back to bed and find an Irish patriot leaning against the door, and you dodge by with your gun under your coat pointing at him, and he swings about with his gun under his coat, and neither of you has the nerve to shoot the other. Oh, it’s money for nothing, and the life fills a man full of joy!” He beat his mouth with his handkerchief, and muttered, “My God, my God, my God!” “Poor man,” said my wife. He pivoted round. “And the Castle people expect such wonderful things. Last night, oh, last night!” “What happened last night?” “Last night they said to me, ‘Old bean, just paddle down to Irishtown and watch a house there for half an hour. Watch it from ten to ten-thirty, and see if anything happens. We think it’s a meeting-place. Just watch for half an hour. It’s quite simple. Money for nothing!’ “Terrible place, Irishtown. Have you been there? Then don’t. Home of dock labourers and navvies. I found my house, and in two minutes a patriot who believed in the soap boycott came and breathed in my face. And in five minutes a dear old lady came and looked at me as if she wanted to bite me in the tonsils. I began to feel hot and bothered. It was cold, cold, cold, and there was one lamp, which I seemed to be getting under all the time. In ten minutes I was feeling like death. Then, as the dear old bean at the Castle suggested, something did happen. All the doors in Irishtown opened at the same moment, and people came rushing out. And one man shouted, in a terrible voice, ‘There he goes, the C.I.D.!’ “The C.I.D. did go. Oh yes, the C.I.D. went. I butted into an old beggar lady, and knocked her spinning. I rushed down one street and up the next, and bowled over two or three children, and a dear old girl who was trotting out of church full of beans at having saved her soul. I trod on a blind man and his dog, and the dog bit the blind man, and all the other dogs barked, and all the boys whistled, and the married women hitched up their stockings, and the old men and the cripples joined in the chase, shouting, ‘There goes the C.I.D.’ And if I couldn’t have heard ’em, I could have smelt they were after me. “And then I began to get a stitch, a terrible stitch, and every yard I went it got worse. Money for nothing! Yes! What? I couldn’t go another yard, and I pulled out my gun and came about under a lamp and waved it at them.