It cannot represent the loss of business, employment, goodwill, trade, and the thousand and one other losses inseparable from such a catastrophe. Take, for example, the loss of the Royal Hibernian Academy, with thousands of pounds of pictures. No price can repay these, for they represented perhaps the culminating point, or at least the turning point, in careers which had had years of hard struggles, and which had set perhaps a lifetime's hopes upon a single canvas. From all accounts, too, it was the merest chance that the whole northern portion of the town did not fall a victim to the devouring flames, and it is hard to understand the psychology of the military mind which could risk even the mere possibility of such an event, as it is hard to understand why the firemen were fired on by the rebels when trying to extinguish the flames. The hardest part of it all was, moreover, that the blow fell almost entirely upon the shoulders of the innocent, viz. the merchants, tradesmen, shopkeepers, and employees, who were thus ruined at a single stroke within the space of a few hours without even a chance of a protest. People began to ask seriously whether it had really been necessary at all, and the verdict was not always complimentary to the authorities. Mr. Healy raised the question in the House whether any such measures had ever been really necessary, considering that the rebels held such few positions, and these could have been isolated by the municipal water supply being cut off. It certainly seems plausible that some less brutal methods could have been adopted, considering the way Cork was saved from a similar catastrophe by the tact of the clergy, who would only have been too willing, and undoubtedly would have had the power, to act as mediators between the rebels and military in the name of the civil authorities and in the interests of the inhabitants principally and Ireland generally. A very cute suggestion I heard from Mr. George Atkinson, the well-known Dublin artist, as we were preparing the cover of the present volume in his studio, struck me as particularly plausible. "As long as the rebels were in their strongholds untouched," he said, "they were practically powerless, and could only have covered themselves with contempt and ridicule if they had been left alone. "These men were asking for martyrdom and the glory of battle: why on earth give them their admitted object?