It was the busy hour of the evening in Stephen Foy’s public-house in the small western town of Ballybor, and Larry O’Halloran, the barman, never ceased drawing corks and measuring out “half ones” of whisky for the endless flow of customers. Larry was a good example of a new type of Irishman which the Sinn Fein movement has produced—a type regarded with sorrow and amazement by the older generation, and at present unknown in England. Whatever faults an Irishman possessed, he always had the saving virtues of wit and cheerfulness. Probably the British have been the last nation in the world to recognise the great value of clever propaganda, but there is no doubt that the originators of the Sinn Fein movement knew the great influence of judicious propaganda—they had efficient instructors in the Boches—and wisely started at the beginning, that is, with the children at school, and the result is sadly apparent in the south and west of Ireland to-day in the hatred of the British Empire among the young people; and so obsessed are they with this hatred that they have neglected to learn the good manners of their elders. While Larry’s hands never ceased serving out drink, his brain—trained from childhood to one end only—never ceased running on one subject, how and when to obtain arms to defeat the British. Only the previous evening Larry had achieved the ambition of his young life, when he was elected captain by a large majority of the Volunteers in place of Patsey Mulligan, who had been tried by court-martial and executed for treachery to the Irish Republican Army. Larry, in spite of his long hair and dreamy Celtic eyes, was no fool, and knew quite well that a battalion of Volunteers without arms was about as much use for fighting as a mob of old women with umbrellas, and that if ever they were to fight the British with any chance of success, they must have arms, and not only rifles, but machine-guns. Previous to this, by a system of raids at night, every known shot-gun in the district had been collected by the Volunteers; but Larry realised that to send a Volunteer, armed with a single-barrel shot-gun, to fight a British infantryman armed with a magazine rifle, was only a good example of the old saying of sending a boy on a man’s errand. While Larry was racking his brains how to obtain arms, a youth, obviously an American, walked in, accompanied by a strange countryman, and proceeded to a small private room at the back of the house. But though Larry’s thoughts were far away, trying to get Mausers in Germany, his eyes were busy in the public-house, and as the couple disappeared into the room, he saw at once that the countryman’s walk was the walk of a soldier. Larry knew the boy, Micky Fee, well. His father was a wealthy Irish-American, who, amongst other business, owned an arms factory in the States, and had refused the request of the Inner Brotherhood repeatedly to send arms to Ireland for the Volunteers.