"It would be very difficult for anyone to write anything just at present, for things are trembling in the balance. There is a most tremendous battle going on at the present moment at the Castle, we understand, between General Friend and Augustine Birrell--in other words, between the military and the civil authorities--and everything depends upon that issue. "They want to take away our arms, for example, and not those of Redmond or Carson, and the latter will stand by and see it done without a word; but we know that's only the thin end of the wedge of the complete subjugation of Ireland to the soldier, as in the days of Cromwell, and even if we stand alone we will stop that. "They don't half of them know a tenth of our power; even people in Ireland don't realize it. We are completely organized and perfectly equipped, far better even than the Ulster Volunteers are, and they will find out their mistake when they try. "They've made two attempts already, in a hole-and-corner sort of way, at the Gaelic Press and at Liberty Hall, and the police found themselves looking into the barrels of revolvers each time. Well, all I can say is, when the day comes and they determine to strike--and we'll get wind of it--you may depend upon it the whole world will get a surprise; it will be like nothing else in Irish history for seven hundred years. "We have our supplies at regular intervals, and our local commanders, with each province fully organized under them, and a complete system of code messages which never go through the post, but are distributed by means of secret dispatch-riders, and if the signal went forth to-night, to-morrow morning the whole of Ireland would be up in arms." All of which, I need hardly say, I took--as everyone in my place would have taken it--_cum grano salis_, but it all came back to me the moment I heard the first shot. Especially did it flash across my mind when, bringing back to Dun's Hospital a dead Sinn Feiner, the famous document fell out of his pocket, which is strikingly similar in thought to my friend's prognostications. According to Alderman Kelly, speaking on the Thursday before the outbreak in the Dublin Corporation, some such order had been "recently addressed to and was on the files of Dublin Castle," according to which the arrest of all the leaders of the Irish Volunteers, together with the members of the Sinn Fein Council, the Executive Committee of the National (Redmondite) Volunteers, and the Executive Committee of the Gaelic League, had been sanctioned. Probably, however, the best diagnosis of the situation immediately preceding the outbreak was the letter published by the _New Statesman_ of May 6th, that had been written as early as April 7th, and which, coming from the most eminent victim of the danger so clearly foreseen by him, must have special force at the present moment. It was from no less than F. Sheehy Skeffington.