"LORD MAYOR REQUESTS GOOD ORDER AT RECEPTION!" This plea was followed by a paragraph asking that the people attending the reception would not allow themselves to be provoked into disorder by the British military. Then there was the concluding exclamation: "GOD SAVE IRELAND!" On my way to the Sinn Fein headquarters in Harcourt street, I passed the Mansion House of the Lord Mayor and found two long-coated Dublin Military Police stripping the new wet poster from the yellow walls. When I arrived at Number 6, Harcourt street, I saw black-clad Mrs. Sheehy-Sheffington, in somewhat agitated absorption of thought, coming down the worn steps of the old Georgian house. In the upper back room, earnest young secretaries worked in swift silence. One of them, a curly-haired girl with her mouth o-ed about a cigarette, puffed unceasingly. At last Harry Boland, secretary of Sinn Fein, entered. "The council decides tonight," he admitted. His eyes were bright and faraway like one whose mind is on a coming crisis. When I told him I would drop in again to hear the decision, he protested that they would be at it till late. On my counter protest that time made no difference to me, he promised that if I would not come he would send me word at eleven that night. "But I think," he added, "we won't know till morning." At ten that night, Boots knocked at my door. I concluded that there had been a stampeded decision. But on going out I discovered the Associated Press correspondent there. He told me that he heard that I was to receive the news and that he did not believe that there was any necessity of bothering the Sinn Feiners twice for the same decision. "I think the reception is quite likely," he volunteered. "This afternoon a good many of the Sinn Fein army were at University chapel at confession. At the girls' hostels of National University--which is regarded as a sort of adolescent Sinn Fein headquarters--there have been strict orders that the girls are to remain indoors tomorrow night." When the messenger arrived at eleven to say that no decision had been reached, I made an appointment for an interview on the following day with DeValera. Electricity was in the air by morning. There were all sorts of sparks. Young men in civilian clothes ran for trams with their hands over their hip pockets. A delightful girl whom I had met, boarded my car with a heavy parcel in her hands. As the British officer next me rose to give her his seat, her cheeks became very pink. Sometime later she told me that, like the rest of the Sinn Fein volunteers, she had received her mobilization orders, and that the parcel the officer had relented for was--her rifle. At that time, her division of the woman's section of the Sinn Fein volunteers was pressing a plan for the holding of the reception. In order, however, that no needed fighters would be killed, the girls had asked that they should be first to meet the president. Then, when the machine guns commenced, "only girls" would fall.