" combat.

One remark of the Countess's is very typical of both her temper and her
temperament, and in a way prophetic.

It was supposed to have been said to a local Dundalk man, and was to the
effect that if she could only shoot one British soldier she would die
happy--a wish she must certainly have realized, for she was continually
seen with a small rifle in her hand, and, according to a rumour,
actually did shoot one on Stephen's Green.

Eoin McNeill, the able editor of the _Irish Volunteer_, is another
interesting character, not only in view of the part he had taken to
raise the revolutionary army, but also for the way, to use the words of
John Dillon, "he broke its back" when he found out that they were to
rise on that fatal Easter Monday--though this did not save him from the
vengeance of the law.

In striking contrast to the rather vapid sentimentalism and abstract
theorizing of many of the periodicals controlled by the Sinn Feiners was
his own sheet, the _Irish Volunteer_. It was the most practical of all
the periodicals, and, beyond ordinary editorials and topical articles,
always contained "Orders for the Week," which included night classes and
lectures and drills, while diagrams of trenches and earthworks appeared
which covered the whole of Ireland.

It is only when looking back over past numbers, with their articles on
night operations, local guides, reconnoitring, organization of
transports, reserves, signalling, and so forth, that one sees how it is
that they were able to hold up Dublin for a solid week; but Eoin McNeill
owed his inspiration entirely to the men of Ulster.

Some of the men, on the other hand, were of the gentlest disposition. No
one, for example, could be more the antithesis of the revolutionary in
real life than P. H. Pearse, President and Commander-in-Chief of the
Republican Army. Indeed, according to one account he was to have
replaced Dr. Mahaffy as Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, in the event
of the rising proving successful. Pearse was not even an Irishman, being
the son of an English convert to Catholicism who had emigrated to
Ireland, but he was an enthusiastic Gaelic scholar, and there was
nothing he loved better than wandering among the peasantry of Galway and
Connemara, while in his own establishment all the servants spoke Irish
fluently.

Though he had at one time intended taking up journalism, and was even
called to the Bar, he was both by profession and inclination