Mrs. Slaney had the last word. “Iniquitous!” she exclaimed in my ear, as I was looking for the top step. “But now you will be able to see for yourself what our splendid young men are experiencing every day.” As I have said there were two lorries, one like a chicken coop and the other unlike a chicken coop. We were told to get into the chicken coop. This I at least was most agreeable to do, as I had no desire to be a target of homeless Sinn Feiners. Then with a flourish we were away under the eyes of many interested people hanging from upper windows. We raced through the deserted streets. It had been raining, and the roads shone wherever the lamps fell upon them. We were the second car. There seemed in our lorry two sorts of seats, a bad sort, and a worse sort, wooden planks resting on boxes, and rolls of wire. We sat, about a dozen all told, on these things, and except for O’Grady and myself, every man had a rifle and about three guns apiece. At the end of a minute we were about to fly down Grafton Street, when the front car came to a halt and began to run round. This time it took the lead down Kildare Street, and we after it, and we all came to a stop this side of the ruined Maples Hotel, at No 29, which was Darrel Figgis’s flat. “They’re after him,” I thought. “They are very optimistic people.” Figgis’s flat was under the roof, and there was no light burning. Half the Auxiliaries left the lorries, filed up the steps, and a great banging began at the door. The sound echoed down the streets. Then a light appeared at the top of the house, the window opened, and a woman in a nightgown leaned out. I thought it was Mrs. Figgis; but it turned out to be Mrs. Coneray, president of the Woman’s Franchise League. The knocking never ceased, the figure above disappeared, and presently the door opened, and the Auxiliaries were swallowed up in the dark of the passage. There followed a long wait in the cold. Suddenly a man at my side leapt round like a cat spotting a mouse. Everybody waked up. “A man ran across the road just then,” he called out. “At the mouth of Molesworth Street. I swear he did.” One or two Auxiliaries mooched backwards and forwards across the road with their rifles under their arms. One of these, with his rifle at the ready, went as far as the corner of Molesworth Street; but he came back saying there was nothing to see. There was another wait, which was shortened by a small chatty individual who came up to our lorry and began to talk to me through the wire netting. He chatted like an old acquaintance. “We took Desmond Fitzgerald,” he said, in the pleasantest fashion. “A bad house that.” “Is it?” I answered. “Figgis was there lately,” he went on. “So I am told. I never saw him.” “Why are you there?” “I don’t appear to be there just now.” “Why don’t you move?” “No need to. You’ve done it for me.”