After two weeks more, I left the hospital and went to stay with a friend in Dublin. It seemed very strange to me not to be going back to Surrey House. How everything had changed! As soon as I was strong enough, I went around to see where the fighting had destroyed whole streets. Dublin was scarred and, it seemed to me, very sick. I recalled momentarily that a teacher of mine had once said the name Dublin meant "the Black Pool."

The building where I had first met Thomas McDonagh, the Volunteer headquarters, had a "to let" sign in its windows. Who would want to engage in business in a place where such high hopes had been blasted?

Liberty Hall was a shell, empty of everything but memories.

Around the post-office, all other buildings had been leveled, but the great building stood there like a monument to Easter Week.

The windows stared vacantly from the house on Leinster Road. Everything had been taken from it. The looters must have had a merry time. Hundreds of houses had been thus sacked, for the British soldiers had lived up to that Tommy whose words make Kipling's famous song:

Against our soldiers, on the other hand, a great many of whom were very poor, there had not been a single accusation of looting. In the post-office, for instance, they ordered one of the captured British officers to guard the safe. In the streets where windows had been broken, they tried to keep the people from pillaging the shops. Whatever money our men found lying loose in the buildings they occupied was turned over to their superior officers. Again and again I myself had seen men of the Citizen Army, quite as poor as any British soldier, hand over money to Commandant Mallin. Had I only thought of it, I could have taken this with me when I was carried to the hospital. The cause would have been at least one hundred pounds richer.

At the College of Surgeons we had destroyed nothing except a portrait of Queen Victoria. We took that down and made puttees out of it. We did not feel we were doing any wrong, for it was Queen Victoria who, in 1848, wrote to her uncle, King Leopold of Belgium:

"There are ample means of crushing the rebellion in Ireland, and I think it very likely to go off without any contest, which people (I think rightly) rather regret. The Irish should receive a good lesson or they will begin it again."

From this quotation any one can see that the Queen looked upon the Irish as aliens, which, indeed, they are.

We also were very careful of the museum and library at the College of Surgeons. Although the men did not have any covering and the nights were cold, they did not cut up the rugs and carpets, but doubled them and crept in between the folds in rows.

About Jacob's Biscuit Factory, during Easter Week, even though it was a very dangerous spot, the employees had hovered, for fear their means of livelihood would be destroyed. But it was not. The machinery was left uninjured, for we always remembered our own poor.

At Guinness's brewery, where great quantities of stout were stored, none of it was touched. Most of our men are teetotalers, anyway.

Some of the poor of Dublin had tried to pillage at first, but it was a pathetic attempt. I saw one specimen of this on Easter Tuesday, while carrying a despatch. There was a crowd of people about a shoe-shop. The windows had been smashed, and the poor wretches were clambering into the shop at great risk of cutting themselves. Once inside, despite all the outer excitement, they were taking the time to try on shoes! Many of them, one could see, had never had a pair of new shoes in their lives. Visitors to Dublin going through the poorer parts are always surprised at the number of children and young girls who walk about bare-footed in icy weather. It is in this way that their health is undermined.

One day during the week after I left the hospital, I heard that a batch of prisoners was to be taken to England aboard a cattle-boat leaving the pier called North Wall. I went down at once to watch for them. It was a very wet day, and the prisoners had been marched six miles from Richmond barracks through the pouring rain. But they were singing their rebel songs, just as if they had never been defeated and were not on their way to the unknown horrors of an English prison.

The officer in charge seemed much excited, though he had five hundred soldiers to look after a hundred prisoners.

"For God's sake, close in, or we'll be rushed!" he shouted to his men. Then the soldiers, with fixed bayonets, "closed in" upon the wet crowd of rebels, who actually seemed to feel the humor of it.

I knew some of the boys, and walked in between the bayonets to shake hands with them and march a part of the way. They had heard I was dead, and looked at first as if they were seeing a ghost. One of them, a little, lame playwright of whom I had caught a glimpse at Bridewell, had told me at the time that he was writing a farce about the revolution to show its absurdity. He had had nothing to do with the rising, for it was his brother who had been with us at the College of Surgeons. There was not even a charge against him; yet here he was, limping along in the rain and mud, but still cheerful. This chap gave me a bundle of clothes and a message for his mother, so I hunted her up the next morning. She did not know he had been deported, and was in despair, for she had left her little cottage in the country to be near her son in Dublin. When I visited her she was just back from market with fruit she had bought to take to him, as it was visiting day at the barracks.

These are some of the things that made even quiet old mothers grow bitter.