When I went back to Dublin in August, it was to find that almost every one on the streets was wearing republican colors. The feeling was bitter, too—so bitter that the British soldiers had orders to go about in fives and sixes, but never singly. They were not allowed by their officers to leave the main thoroughfares, and had to be in barracks before dark,—that is, all except the patrol. The city was still under martial law, but it seemed to me the military authorities were the really nervous persons. Much of this bitterness came from the fact that people remembered how, after the war in South Africa which lasted three years instead of five days, only one man had been executed. After our rising sixteen men had been put to death.

Everywhere I heard the opinion expressed that if the revolution could have lasted a little longer, we would have been flooded with recruits. As it was, the rising had taken people completely by surprise. Before they could recover from that surprise, it was over, and its leaders were paying the penalty of death or imprisonment. One week is a short time for the general, uninformed mass of a dominated people to decide whether an outbreak of any sort is merely an impotent rebellion, or a real revolution with some promise of success. Besides, there have been so many isolated protests in Ireland, doomed from the first to failure.

There was evidence everywhere that the feeling of bitterness was not vague, but the direct result of fully understanding what had happened. At a moving-picture performance of "The Great Betrayal," I was surprised at the spirit of daring in the audience. The story was about one of those abortive nationalist revolts in Italy which preceded the revolution that made Italy free. The plot was parallel in so many respects to the Easter Week rising in Ireland that crowds flocked every day to see it. In the final picture, when the heroic leaders were shot in cold blood, men in the audience called out bitterly:

"That's right, Colthurst! Keep it up!"

Colthurst was the man who shot Sheehy Skeffington without trial on the second day of the rising. He had been promoted for his deeds of wanton cruelty, and only the fact that a royal commission was demanded by Skeffington's widow and her friends, made it necessary to adjudge him insane as excuse for his behavior, when that behavior was finally brought to light.

It was on the occasion of my visit to the moving-pictures that I was annoyed by the knowledge that a detective was following me. His only disguise was to don Irish tweeds such as "Irish Irelanders" wear to stimulate home industry. He had been following me about Dublin ever since my arrival for my August visit. To this day I don't know why he did not arrest me, nor what he was waiting for me to do. But I decided now to give him the slip. In Glasgow I have had much practice jumping on cars going at full speed. The Dublin cars are much slower, so as a car passed me in the middle of the block, I suddenly leaped aboard, leaving my British friend standing agape with astonishment on the sidewalk. Doubtless he felt the time had come for me to carry out whatever plot I had up my sleeve, and that he had been defeated in his purpose of looking on. I never saw him again.

Even the children of Ireland have become republicans. There was a strike not long ago in Dublin schools because an order was issued by the authorities that school children should not wear republican colors. The day after the teachers made this announcement some few children obeyed the order, but they appeared in white dresses with green and orange ribbons in their hair or cap. When this, too, was forbidden, the pupils in one of the schools marched out in a body, and proceeded to other schools throughout the city to call out the pupils on strike. Any school that did not obey their summons promptly had its windows smashed. Finally, the police were called and marched against them. The children, as the sympathetic press put it, "retreated in good order to Mountjoy Square, where they took their stand and defended their position with what ammunition was at hand, namely, paving-stones." The end of it all was that the children won, and went back to school wearing as many badges or flags as they wished.

Irish boys are showing their attitude, too, for at Padraic Pearse's school, conducted now by a brother of Thomas McDonagh who taught there before the rising, there are several hundred boys on the waiting-list. The school never was as crowded before; the work that Pearse gave his life for, the inspiriting of Irish youth, is still going on.

Out on Leinster Road one day, I walked past that house where, not nine months before, I had met so many people of the republican movement. The house was empty, with that peculiar look of bereavement that some houses wear. It had been an embodiment of the Countess Markievicz, and, now that she was gone, looked doomed. Where was she? Over in England in Aylesbury Prison, but fortunately at work in the kitchen. I could not fancy her depressed beyond activity of some sort that in the end would be for Ireland's good.

"A felon's cap's the noblest crown an Irish head can wear."

This was one of her favorite quotations, and I knew that in wearing the cap, her courage would not desert her. Her sister had seen her, and told me she was in good spirits; grateful that they had put her to work and not left her to inactivity or brooding thoughts. She had repeated what an old woman in Mountjoy Prison had said to her:

"Man never built a wall but God Almighty threw a gap in it!"

Last November I paid another visit to Dublin. The bitterness had increased.