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the reproaches of a person gone from this earth, but who still, she never questioned, could be pleased or displeased with her actions.

She did not always try to understand or follow; when she was sleepy she read merely with her eyes. To-night her mind. was too full of personal things to permit of strict attention to the text.

There was a stir. Both doors of her room were open; the little unobtrusive one into the dressing-room for air,-the window there stood wide open through the night, the large one into the sittingroom so as to leave a free road to Miss Madison's room beyond. Through this now slipped a slender form in a soft, furbordered wrapper, her front locks done up in curling-kids.

"You in bed?"

"Yes; I'm just reading my chapter." "Livvy gone?"

Livvy, or Miss Deliverance Jones, was the maid they had brought from America, a New York negress of the most faintly colored complexion, with hair mysteriously blond.

"Yes, she's gone."

"I'm not a bit sleepy, are you? I'm too excited. Let's talk."

She climbed on to her friend's bed, gathered her knees to her chin, and hugged them, with the effect of hugging to herself a great happiness.

Mrs. Hawthorne closed her Bible and put it aside. The single candle by which she had been reading showed the shining mirthfulness of the eyes with which the two regarded each other.

"Was n't it fun?" "Oh, was n't it!"

They spoke softly, whether because the suggestion of the late hour was upon them, or they thought, without thinking, that Livvy might still be near. They whispered like school-girls who have come together in forbidden fun.

"I never did have such a good time." "Nor I, neither. O Hat, is n't it fun!" "Is n't it, just!"

"See here, Hat, you 've got to teach me to dance. I was almost crazy this

evening, I wanted so to be dancing with the rest. Where d' you learn?"

"I went to dancing-school, my dear." "No! Did you?"

What

"Yes, I did; all one winter. are you thinking about? I've been to parties in my life. Not many, but I 've been. There was the Home Club party-"

"Yes, of course. I remember how I teased once to go to the Home Club party; but ma would n't let me. I had n't anything to put on, anyhow. To think I've always yearned so to have a good time, and now I'm having it! O Hat, was n't it lovely! That's a mighty nice house of the Fosses'. How good it looked, all fixed up! The flowers and candles, one room opening into the other, everything just right. Hat, Mrs. Foss is the finest woman I ever knew, and in my opinion makes the most elegant appearance. She's the one I'd choose to be like if I could. Just watch me copy-cat her. You'll see. 'My dear Mrs. Hawthorne, pray don't speak of the trouble! It's been nothing but a pleasure. Be sure you call upon us whenever we can be of the smallest service.'"

"You 've caught her, Nell, you silly thing. Down to the ground."

"I'm going to pattern after her till it comes natural. How sweet they all are! How kind they 've been!" Mrs. Hawthorne grew dreamy.

"Your dress, Nell, was a perfect success," the other ran on-"perfect. How did you think mine looked? I'll tell you a compliment I got for you, if you 'll tell me one you got for me. If not, I'll save it up in my secret breast till you 're ready to make a trade."

"To think," said Mrs. Hawthorne, still engrossed by her dream of absent and bygone things, "that we 're the same little girls-and one of them barefoot!—who used to play house together on Cape Cod, and pin on any old rag that would tail along the ground, and play ladies!"

"Nell-I'm so afraid of forgetting and calling you Nell that every time I catch myself near doing it I can feel the cold sweat break out on my brow."

"What would it matter? We are n't impostors, Hat. We 're just having fun, and don't want our real names to queer it. If they should slip out when we are n't thinking, they 'd simply sound like. nicknames we 've got for each other. But they won't slip out. I'm too fond of calling you Estelle. Don't you love to call me Aurora? Hat, how did I behave, far as you could see?"

"Nell, if I had n't known you, and had just been seeing you for the first time, I should have said to myself: 'What a fine, good-looking, beautifully dressed, refined, and lady like woman that is! Wish t' I might make her acquaintance.' And what would you have said, if you 'd seen me, never having met me before?"

"I should have said: 'What a bright, smart, intelligent, and rarely beautiful girl! So well dressed, too, and slender as a worm! A queen of society. I do like her looks! She's the spittin' image of my little friend Hattie Carver, the schoolmarm in East Boston, that I used to know! Go ahead, Hat; what was it?"

"Sure, now, you've got one for me?" "Sure."

"It was What 's-his-name, the English fellow we see every time we go in to Cook's-Mr. Dysart. Leslie says he comes of a very good family. He said to me, 'How very charming Mrs. Hawthorne is looking this evening!''

"Hattie, that man 's a humbug, that man 's leading a double life. He said to me, 'How very charming Miss Madison is looking this evening! He did."

"Go 'way! You 're making it up." "No, I ain't! Stop, Hattie! I know: I am not. Confusion upon it! You 've made me so nervous when I talk that I can't say ain't without jumping as if I'd sat on a pin!"

"Nell Goodwin, look me square in the eve. How many times did you say ain't at the party this evening?"

"Not once; I swear it. I was looking out every minute. 'I am not,' I said; 'We are not,' I said; 'He does n't,' I said; 'He is n't,' I said. There! Between you 'n'

I, Hat, it's a dreadful nuisance, keeping my mind on the way I talk. What's the matter with my natural way of talking?"

"It's all right at home, Nell, but it 's different over here. They 're a different. kind of people we 're thrown with."

"This pernickety way of talking never sounds cozy or friendly one bit. Oh, do you say so? 'Between you and I' is n't correct? But I thought you said-no, don't explain, not at this time of night, Estelle. You know all those sorts of things, my dear Estelle, because you 're paid by the Government to know them. I don't; but I know lots and lots of things that are a sight funnier."

She grabbed one of the pillows and flung it at her friend, who flung it back at her; and the simple creatures laughed.

Aurora re-tied in a bow the blue ribbon that closed the collar of her nightgown, and settled back again, with her arms out on the white satin quilt, flowered with roses and lined with blue. The two braids of her fair hair lay, one on each side, down her big, undisguised bosom.

"You heaping dish of vanilla icecream!" said Hattie.

"You stick of rhubarb!" said Nell. "Stop, Hat! Behave! Do you suppose all the people we 've invited to come and see us will come?"

"Doctor Chandler will come. And the Hunt girls will come. And Madame Bentivoglio I guess will come."

"Yes, and the Satterlees I'm sure will come. And Mrs. Seymour and her daughter that I said I 'd help with the church fair. And the minister-what was it?Spottiswood."

"And won't the Mr. Hunt come that you were having such a good time with?"

"Yes, he'll come. He'll come tomorrow, I should n't wonder. Then that thinnish fellow with the hair like a hearth-brush-did you meet him? Mr. Fane, a great friend of the Fosses. He's coming to take us sight-seeing." She yawned a wide, audible yawn. "I only hope there 'll be some fun in it. Confound you, Hat, go to bed!"

(To be continued)

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N Easter Sunday, after an absence of several weeks, I returned to Dub

lin from England, and in the evening I walked down to the Abbey Theater to obtain my letters. There was an air of festival in the town, for the rigors of Lent were at an end, and people were making ready for such merriment as is possible in time of war to those whose men are in very present danger in Flanders and France; and as I crossed O'Connell Bridge and stood for a moment or two to look at the high reaches of golden sky which are everywhere visible in Dublin it seemed to me that the "peace . . . which passeth all understanding" had settled on this old, distracted city. There had, indeed, been murmurs and mutter

ings and marches of drilled men, and now and then one met an anxious official, full of foreboding, who spoke desperately of danger; but these were disregarded. One had stood on the pavement to watch the volunteers go by, and had treated them lightly. How could that tattered collection of youths and boys and hungry-looking laborers ever hope to stand against the British army!

One saw them, on St. Patrick's day, marching up Westmoreland Street to College Green, some of them dressed in a green uniform that, except in color, was a replica of the khaki uniform of the British soldier. Most of them had no uniform, and their cheap, ready-made clothes had an extraordinarily unwarlike look

that was made almost ridiculous by the bandoleers and the long, obsolete bayonets and the heavy, out-of-date rifles they carried. The mind, remembering tales of France and Flanders and the Dardanelles, of guns that fired shells a ton in weight for many miles, of an extraordinary complicity of invention whereby men may be slain by men who have never seen themthe mind, remembering these things, found something supremely comical in the spectacle of young clerks and middle-aged laborers steeling their hearts and fitting their bodies with the worn-out implements of war in the hope that they might so disturb the British race that all they desired would instantly be conceded to them.

It is easy now to pitch blame on Mr. Birrell and to say that he should have known this and that he should have known the other; but I doubt whether many men, seeing the procession of volunteers on St. Patrick's day, would have felt any alarm. At most, one imagined, there would be a brawl in the streets, quickly and easily suppressed by a little force of police.

Such was my mood on Easter Sunday when, coming away from the Abbey Theater, I encountered, on Eden Quay, a company of volunteers marching toward Liberty Hall. They had been, I think, in the mountains all day, drilling and marching, and now, tired and hungry, were nearly at the end of the day's work, in a moment or two to be disbanded for the night. They were just such a company of men and boys as I had been accustomed for months past to see parading about the streets: middle-aged, spare-looking laborers in whom the brutalities of the 1911 strike had left deep bitterness; young clerks and shop assistants and schoolteachers, full of generous ideals and emotions that were unchecked by the discipline of wide knowledge and experience; and boys, vaguely idealistic and largely thrilled by the desire for romantic enterprise and the hope of high happenings. And with them, as intent and eager as the men, were a few women and little girls.

I stood on the pavement to watch them

go by. The captain of the company was a man I had known slightly, a modest, quiet, kindly man of honest desires, called Sean Connolly, unrelated, save in the comradeship of arms, to James Connolly. I nodded to him, and he waved his hand to me. The next day he was dead, killed in the street fighting for some ideal that dominated and bound his mind. I remember, too, seeing the Countess Marckevitz in the ranks that Sean Connolly commanded. I had met her twice very casually and did not recognize her in the halflight of the evening, but some one standing by said, "That 's the countess," and I looked, and saw a tired woman who would never admit that she was tired, stumping heavily by in a green uniform, oblivious. of the comments, many of them of mockery, that the onlookers were making.

It is not my business here to explain the rebellion or to describe the causes of it. An adequate explanation would fill too much space, and the causes of it were varied. Some of the volunteers were men belonging to the citizen army which had been formed in 1911 by James Larkin and James Connolly and Captain White, the son of Sir George White, the defender of Ladysmith, during what was probably the most brutally conducted strike (on the part of the employers) in the history of industrial disorder. I have no knowledge of what was in these men's minds, but I do not doubt that the rebellion meant to them less of an opportunity to establish an Irish republic than an opportunity to avenge their outraged humanity. Others were men who remembered, no doubt, that the gun-running practised by their side was treated with a severity that ended in death, whereas the gun-running practised by the followers of Sir Edward Carson was treated as an admirable exploit. Others, again, and these were the majority, were men who loved Ireland and sought to set her free. If one were to set out to apportion blame for the rebellion, one would find that it must be distributed over so many people that in the end one could only say, "We are all to

blame; we Irish people, old and young, are all at fault."

But while one does not set out to explore the causes of the rebellion, one may briefly say that the origin of the volunteers lay in the necessity which some Irishmen felt for an effective defense against the volunteers who had been created in Ulster by Sir Edward Carson. The extent of that necessity was made plain when what is called the Curragh Camp incident happened. On that occasion a number of officers refused to obey an order (so it is said) to proceed to Belfast and keep the Unionist volunteers in control. I do not believe that any reputable Irishmen wished to see the Ulster volunteers terrorized or put to death by British soldiers; but the incident set a number of Nationalists wondering what sort of defense they would have if the Ulster volunteers made an attack on them. The temper of the soldiers at the Curragh indicated that they could hope for little help from that quarter, and there was no other defense, apart from the police. So they set up volunteers of their own, under the leadership of John McNeill, a professor at the National University. The purpose of these volunteers was, first, to defend themselves against attack, and, secondly, to make a display of force if Home Rule was not conceded to Ireland. After the outbreak of the war this purpose was extended to prevent the imposition of conscription on the Irish people.

The reader, remembering these purposes of the volunteers, may now wonder why the rebellion took place, seeing that an attack on the Nationalists was not made by the Ulster volunteers, that Home Rule had in law been conceded to Ireland, and that the Irish people were expressly excluded from the scope of the Military Service Act. The answer to such speculation is that the great majority of the Irish volunteers firmly believed that the Home Rule Act would be annulled after the war. They were convinced that the Liberal government would quit office on the conclusion of peace, and be succeeded by a Conservative govern

ment, which would make as little of the Home Rule Act as the Germans made of the treaty guaranteeing the neutrality of Belgium; and they were confirmed in this belief by the tone of an obstinate English newspaper. A further factor was the treatment of the Irish regiments in Gallipoli, where, although they bore the brunt of the fighting, they were disregarded by the commanders in a thoroughly incomprehensible manner. One of the strange features of the Gallipoli campaign is the fact that Admiral de Robeck forgot to mention the names of the Irish regiments which took heroic part in landing on the peninsula, although he remembered to mention the names of all the other regiments concerned in it!

The causes, then, which led up to the rebellion were many and varied, but the dominant cause was this suspicion that once again the English Government was about to betray the Irish people. I belong to a school of Irish Home-Rulers who believe that the destinies of Ireland and England in the world are as inseparable as the waters of the Liffey and the Mersey in the Irish Sea, and I do not believe that these suspicions of English perfidy were justified; but I can readily understand why men of an impatient temperament, in whose minds the wrongs of their country had made an indelible impression, were quick to suspect treachery where they should have seen only the petulance of irresponsible and impotent politicians and journalists.

WHEN the history of the Irish rebellion is written I suppose people will notice. particularly how completely it surprised every one, even the officials who had fears of its happening. I do not imagine that any of that company of volunteers whom I saw on Easter Sunday evening had the slightest idea that there was to be a rebellion on the following morning. I know that the Countess Marckevitz was not aware of the proposed outbreak until it actually began, and I know of one volunteer who did not know of what was about to take place until he heard the sound of

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