Only a few days before the Ashtown fight I had been joking with Aine Malone and telling her they would have to nurse me if I was wounded. I little thought that my joke of December, 1919, would come true, and that I would be installed in Grantham Street in the care of the Malones. The wound in my leg proved more serious than I expected, and my head too was painful. For three whole months I was laid up, scarcely able to move about at all. I am not so sure that I felt any way anxious to get away from my surroundings. Everyone was kind to me. Peadar Clancy came to see me and gave me the news nearly every day. I have fond, if sad, memories of pleasant hours spent with Peadar as he chatted or read for me. Dick McKee and Sean Treacy and Hogan were all kind too, and came to see me regularly. Peadar and Dick and Sean Treacy alas were not to see another Christmas. But I know they died smiling and happy. Apart from my good and thoughtful comrades there was an even stronger reason which made me think little of the pain and the indoor confinement. That was my kindest and ever attentive nurse—then Brighid Malone—now my wife. Few people have the good fortune to be nursed through sickness by their future wives whose presence counts for more than all that medical skill can give. But the story of our marriage a year and a half later, in circumstances that a fiction writer would discredit as too far-fetched for any Wild West novel, I must reserve for its proper place in a later chapter. CHAPTER XVII. FROM TARA TO TIPPERARY. At the opening of 1920 I had plenty of leisure, while my wound was healing, to review the year that had passed. Soloheadbeg had borne fruit. The best tribute was that contained in the official statistics that were now issued from time to time by the British Government regarding “Crime in Ireland.” Crime as such was, of course, almost unknown in Ireland until the arrival of the Black and Tans. When the British Government used the word “crime” in reference to Ireland it generally meant active operations against the Army of Occupation. So it was solemnly announced to the world at the beginning of 1920 that during 1919 scores of attacks had been made on British troops or police, hundreds of raids for arms had been carried out and a dozen policemen (that is, armed spies) had been shot dead. If the British Government thought the publication of these statistics would make us repent of our actions and shed our patriotism it had miscalculated. The only effect was to make us more determined that there would be a much bigger record of such “crimes” to be compiled at the end of 1920. And we kept our resolution!