responsibility
ended when the boys passed through the doors of the club. The boys
took the view that at that moment their opportunity began.

They rioted. Every window in the place was shattered. Everything else
breakable--fortunately there was not much--was smashed into small
bits. A Y.M.C.A. worker, a young man lent to us for the occasion, and
recommended as experienced with boys' clubs in London, fled to a
small room and locked himself in. The tumult became so terrific that
an officer of high standing and importance, whose office was in the
neighbourhood, sent an orderly to us with threats. It was one of the
occasions on which it is good to be an Irishman. We have been
accustomed to riots all our lives, and mind them less than most other
people. We know--this is a fact which Englishmen find it difficult to
grasp--that cheerful rioters seldom mean to do any serious mischief.

Yet, I think, even J.'s heart must have failed him a little. Very
soon the colonel, who was to open the club with his address, would
arrive. He was the best and staunchest of friends. He had fought
battles for the club and patiently combated the objections in high
quarters. But he did like order and discipline.

It was one of our fixed principles, about the only fixed principle we
had at first, that the club was to be run by moral influence, not by
means of orders and threats. Our loyalty to principle was never more
highly tried. It seems almost impossible to bring moral influence to
bear effectively when you cannot make yourself heard and cannot move
about. Yet, somehow, a kind of order was restored; and there was no
uncertainty about the cheers with which the colonel was greeted when
he entered the room. The boys in the other rooms who could not see
him cheered frantically. The boys on the balcony, the boys standing
in the window frames, all cheered. They asked nothing better than to
be allowed to go on cheering.

With the colonel were one or two other officers, our benefactor, the
local head of the Y.M.C.A., and a solitary lady, Miss N. I do not
know even now how she got there or why she came, but she was not half
an hour in the room before we realised that she was the woman, the
one woman in the whole world, for our job. Miss N. was born to deal
with wild boys. The fiercer they are the more she loves them, and the
wickeder they are the more they love her. We had a struggle to get
Miss N. Oddly enough she did not at first want to come to t