If this was true, it involved the loss of the Post Office Accountant's Office opposite the G.P.O., the Sackville Street Club, Gresham and Imperial Hotels, and other important buildings, and would have increased H.'s difficulties enormously, as it would have been necessary to build up the Post Office organisation again, with no records, registers, accounts, or documents of any kind--at best a stupendous task. However, fortunately this morning we hear the reports were exaggerated. The Imperial Hotel, Clery's great shop, and one or two others were burnt, but the upper part of the street escaped, and the Accountant's Office and the Sackville Street Club were not touched. This morning Mr. C, who has been H.'s great support all through this trying time (his second in command being away ill), and several other members of the staff are coming here, and with H. they are going down to see what remains of the G.P.O. It is being guarded from looters, as, from the enormous number of telegraph instruments destroyed, there must be a large quantity of copper and other metal,--a very valuable asset,--and also several thousand pounds in cash for payment of staff and soldiers' dependants, besides heaps of other valuable property. Here I must tell you how absolutely heroic the telephone staff have been at the Exchange. It is in a building a considerable distance from the G.P.O., and the Sinn Feiners have made great efforts to capture it. The girls have been surrounded by firing; shots have several times come into the switch-room, where the men took down the boards from the back of the switch-boards and arranged them as shelters over the girls' heads to protect them from bullets and broken glass. Eight snipers have been shot on buildings commanding the Exchange, and one of the guard was killed yesterday; and these twenty girls have never failed. They have been on duty since Tuesday, sleeping when possible in a cellar and with indifferent food, and have cheerfully and devotedly stuck to their post, doing the work of forty. Only those on duty on the outbreak of the rebellion could remain; those in their homes could never get back, so with the aid of the men who take the night duty these girls have kept the whole service going. All telegrams have had to be sent by 'phone as far as the railway termini, and they have simply saved the situation. It has been magnificent! The shooting is by no means over, as many of the Sinn Fein strongholds refuse to surrender. Jacob's biscuit factory is very strongly held, and when the rebels were called on to surrender they refused unless they were allowed to march out carrying their arms! As the book passes through the press, I learn on the one unimpeachable authority that the story about Messrs. Jacob & Co., however picturesque, is purely apocryphal. M.L.N. THE SINN FEIN REBELLION AS I SAW IT, page 59.