“If in the vicinity a policeman is shot, five of the leading Sinn Feiners will be shot. It is not coercion. It is an eye for an eye. We are not ‘drink maddened savages’ as we have been described in the Dublin rags. We are not out for loot. We are inoffensive to women. We are as humane as other Christians, but we have restrained ourselves too long. Are we to lie down while our comrades are shot by the cornerboys and raggamuffins of Ireland? We say, ‘never,’ and all the inquiries in the world will not stop our desire of revenge. Stop the shooting of the police, or we will lay low every house that smells Sinn Fein, and remember Balbriggan. “(_By Order_) BLACK-AND-TANS.” These shorter days of sharper winds I would cut across Stephen’s Green to the top of Grafton Street, finding the gardens a more desolate place than on the brilliant August morning I had strolled in them first. One’s travels seldom took one into the arms of the Sinn Fein leaders, who were “on the run,” and moved about as opportunity allowed, sleeping nightly in different houses; but one did meet prominent women now and then, for the British Government, fatherly and sentimental in this to the end, continued to leave women severely alone, except in one or two exceptional cases. Round about the Green one would come upon the tall black figure of Madam Gonne MacBride, looking like a cypress tree, or get a glimpse of what one believed to be the Countess Markievicz, muffled up in mediæval fashion. In the distance, with firm tread and firmer aspect, a dispatch case always in her hand, would appear Mrs. Sheehy Skeffington; round a corner, at her tireless trot, Mrs. Desmond FitzGerald in her green dress; occasionally the charming figure of Mrs. Despard, the Lord Lieutenant’s sister, slowly pacing with her stick, like a fairy godmother in a Christmas story. Once in a blue moon one did come upon some badly wanted man. Three times, during the most violent spasm of the struggle, I passed the most wanted man in Ireland. In each case he had an escort of eleven. One of these escorts I met coming up Grafton Street, and two moving parallel with Stephen’s Green. The men walked in pairs, their hands in their pockets on their guns and their bombs. In the crowd each pair kept a few yards apart, when the streets were empty they increased the distance, to lose the appearance of a military formation. But the man who knew what to look for could still pick them up. How was it these escorts could move about unchallenged in the face of troops, and police, and spies?