When the messenger arrived at eleven to say that no decision had been reached, I made an appointment for an interview on the following day with DeValera.

Electricity was in the air by morning.  There were all sorts of sparks.  Young men in civilian clothes ran for trams with their hands over their hip pockets.  A delightful girl whom I had met, boarded my car with a heavy parcel in her hands.  As the British officer next me rose to give her his seat, her cheeks became very pink.  Sometime later she told me that, like the rest of the Sinn Fein volunteers, she had received her mobilization orders, and that the parcel the officer had relented for was—­her rifle.

At that time, her division of the woman’s section of the Sinn Fein volunteers was pressing a plan for the holding of the reception.  In order, however, that no needed fighters would be killed, the girls had asked that they should be first to meet the president.  Then, when the machine guns commenced, “only girls” would fall.

Into College Green a brute of a tank had cruised.  The man in charge was inviting people to have a look.  Inside there were red-lipped munition boxes, provender cases, and through the skewer-sized sight-holes next the jutting guns, there were glimpses of shoppers emerging from Grafton street into the Green.  Over the city, against the silver-rimmed, Irish gray clouds, aeroplanes—­there were sixteen in one formation—­buzzed insistently.  Between the little stone columns of the roof railing of Trinity College, machine guns poked out their cold snouts.

“Smoke bombs were dropped over Mount street bridge today,” said Harry Boland with a shrug of his shoulders when I arrived at Sinn Fein headquarters to ask if the reception would still be held.  “What can we do against a force like theirs?”

But there was a strained feeling at headquarters as if the decision had been made after a hard fight.  Alderman Thomas Kelly, one of the oldest of the Sinn Feiners, told me that he had backed DeValera in his refusal to countenance a needless loss of life, and that it was only after a good struggle that their point had won.

“DeValera’s just beyond the town,” whispered Harry Boland to me when he decided that we would leave to see the president at seven—­the hour the executive was due to appear at the bridge.  “They’re searching all the cars that cross the canal bridges.  If there is any trouble as we pass just say that you are an American citizen—­that’d get you through anywhere.”

Knots of still expectant people were gathered at the Mount street bridge.  Squads of long-coated military police patrolled the place.  Children called at games.  The starlight dripped into the canal.  At Portobello bridge we made our crossing.  Nothing happened.  The constables did not even punch the cushions of our car as they did with others to see if munitions were concealed therein.  We swooped down curving roads between white walls hung with masses