I went down to O’Connell Bridge to see this funeral without a corpse. The day had turned into a Sunday, and the streets were filled with the proletariat. The Mass, which I had listened to at the pro-cathedral, had been a stupendous experience. Every inch of the stone pavement of the great church had been covered with kneeling humanity crying out dolorous Latin cries to the chanting of the priests, and fingering countless rosaries. The flood of feeling flowed this way and that like waves heaving in a sea. I did not know whether to marvel at this spectacle or to sneer at it. Were we in this mourning church wrapped in a flame of sorrow, which was going to weld the nation into a metal out of which an everlasting sword could be forged: or more truly were a few tricksters playing on the easily wrought feelings of a not quite adult nation, which, childlike, weeps as easily as it laughs? Labour and Capital over again! Look right, look left--who here was not drawn from the working or shop assistant classes? As I heard these people calling out the sounding Latin phrases, I shook my head. The press upon O’Connell Bridge was tremendous, and presently the hearse came round a corner. It was filled with flowers. After it rolled a Dublin funeral, only there went by a greater line of shabby carriages than even Dublin usually gets together. One looked and looked, and still more horses came round the distant corner. In the following of this funeral marched Irish Volunteers and Cumann na mBan. They left no impression on me other than being dusty and riding on the top of a wave of emotion, which might set them down as quickly as it had lifted them up. Again it was Labour _versus_ Capital, the servant against the master. These people were the same as the kneeling congregation, and the majority of them were growing up. But this demonstration was a manifestation of that resolution which was affecting the nation as new blood poured into the veins of an anæmic man. Whether the exaltation was enduring enough to carry the nation to a renaissance, to a splendid rebirth, or whether it was sufficient and no more to take this people through a struggle with Britain, was a matter for a prophet. A temporary state or a lasting state, its existence could not be denied. One of these nights a man started signalling from a house which looked upon the back of our own. We watched him from our beds. He had a lamp, and lived in a top story. The signalling continued at intervals over a period of several weeks, and what came of it all I do not know; but it made these nights more mysterious watching this lonely man and his lamp high up in the attic.