s hand on the
torch, you think, let us hand it on to our children, but I say no! I say,
let us order an immediate rising."

Presently one of the boxers arrives, sent up to apologise it seems, and to
explain that we had not been recognized. He begins his apology but stops,
and for a moment fixes upon us a meditative critical eye. "No, I will
not," he cries. "What do I care for anyone now but Venus and Adonis and
the other Planets of Heaven."

* * * * *

French sympathisers have been brought to see the old buildings in Galway,
and with the towns of Southern France in their mind's eye, are not in the
least moved. The greater number are in a small crowded hotel. Presently an
acquaintance of mine, peeping, while it is still broad day, from his
bedroom window, sees the proprietress of the hotel near the hall door, and
in the road a serious-minded, quixotic Dublin barrister, with a little boy
who carries from a stick over his shoulder twelve chamber pots. He hears
one angry, and one soft pleading explanatory voice, "But, Madam, I feel
certain that at the unexpected arrival of so many guests, so many guests
of the Nation, I may say, you must have found yourself unprepared." "Never
have I been so insulted." "Madam, I am thinking of the honour of my
country."

* * * * *

I am at Maud Gonne's hotel, and an Italian sympathiser Cipriani, the
friend of Garibaldi, is there, and though an old man now, he is the
handsomest man I have ever seen. I am telling a ghost story in English at
one end of the room, and he is talking politics in French at the other.
Somebody says, "Yeats believes in ghosts," and Cipriani interrupts for a
moment his impassioned declamation to say in English, and with a
magnificent movement and intonation, "As for me, I believe in nothing but
cannon."

* * * * *

I call at the office of the Dublin organization in Westmoreland Street,
and find the front door open, and the office door open, and though the
office is empty the cupboard door open and eighteen pounds in gold upon
the shelf.

* * * * *

At a London Committee meeting I notice a middle-aged man who slips into
the room for a moment, whispers something to the secretary, lays three or
four shillings on a table, and slips out. I am told that he is an Irish
board-school teacher who, in early life, took an oath neither to drink nor