Time and again military and police united in their efforts to get hold of the Republican leaders; but generally without result. Extraordinary precautions were taken for their safety. If a meeting was to be held in a certain house, the streets would be picketed for a great distance round by peaceful citizens leaning smoking against doorposts, and other worthy townspeople propped up against lamp-posts, spitting. Not a fly could have got through the final cordon without the agreed-on signs and passwords. 47 told me once it was necessary to produce a tram ticket of a certain value, dated the previous day, and folded in a certain fashion. It was said on occasions street musicians were posted with orders to play certain tunes in certain events. Many of these stories were true, some legendary, no doubt. 47 was an instructor who taught me well, and tramping Dublin streets, I saw much that was not given to ordinary passers to see, and was told much that must not be repeated. In the midst of this strange time, while the new movement was aiming to push Ireland into the van of progressive nations, there occurred one of those mediæval happenings which only take place to-day in Ireland, of all parts of the British Isles. The statues of Templemore began to bleed. The story goes that on a Friday evening statues of the Blessed Virgin, the Crucifixion, the Blessed Virgin with the child Jesus, and St. Joseph with the Holy Child, belonging to a newsagent at Templemore, began to ooze blood from heart and mouth. At the same time the statues in a nephew’s house also started to ooze blood, and the nephew, a young man of nineteen, had a vision of the Blessed Virgin. The Blessed Virgin ordered the young man to make a depression in the floor of his room, and immediately after there was a miraculous flow of water. At once cures were effected, the first being that of a little girl in the last stages of consumption, who was carried into the house and restored to perfect health. The elders of the town gathered about the statues and offered loud prayers, giving their thanks to God that the town had been saved from the rage of the Black-and-Tans on the previous Monday night, and that none of the innocent citizens had been destroyed. The local clergy, as a whole, were chary of expressing their opinions; but in spite of their silence a great pilgrimage began from all parts of Ireland, travelling to Templemore on horse, on foot, on bicycle, in gig, in dray, in dogcart, in jaunting car, bringing the sick in body and the sick in soul. There was an amazing scene in the yard at the back of the house, where the statues were placed upon a table covered with a white cloth. Townspeople and countrypeople, grandmothers, and their grandchildren, husbands, wives, knelt in a crowd about the table, murmuring their prayers, and touching the statues with beads and prayer-books.