From the roof there comes the sound of machine guns.  Looking towards Sackville Street one picks out easily Nelson’s Pillar, which towers slenderly over all the buildings of the neighbourhood.  It is wreathed in smoke.  Another towering building was the D.B.C.  Cafe.  Its Chinese-like pagoda was a landmark easily to be found, but to-day I could not find it.  It was not there, and I knew that, even if all Sackville Street was not burned down, as rumour insisted, this great Cafe had certainly been curtailed by its roof and might, perhaps, have been completely burned.

On the gravel paths I found pieces of charred and burnt paper.  These scraps must have been blown remarkably high to have crossed all the roofs that lie between Sackville Street and Merrion Square.

At eleven o’clock there is continuous firing, and snipers firing from the direction of Mount Street, and in every direction of the City these sounds are being duplicated.

In Camden Street the sniping and casualties are said to have been very heavy.  One man saw two Volunteers taken from a house by the soldiers.  They were placed kneeling in the centre of the road, and within one minute of their capture they were dead.  Simultaneously there fell several of the firing party.

An officer in this part had his brains blown into the roadway.  A young girl ran into the road picked up his cap and scraped the brains into it.  She covered this poor debris with a little straw, and carried the hat piously to the nearest hospital in order that the brains might be buried with their owner.

The continuation of her story was less gloomy although it affected the teller equally.

“There is not,” said she, “a cat or a dog left alive in Camden Street.  They are lying stiff out in the road and up on the roofs.  There’s lots of women will be sorry for this war,” said she, “and their pets killed on them.”

In many parts of the City hunger began to be troublesome.  A girl told me that her family, and another that had taken refuge with them, had eaten nothing for three days.  On this day her father managed to get two loaves of bread somewhere, and he brought these home.

“When,” said the girl, “my father came in with the bread the whole fourteen of us ran at him, and in a minute we were all ashamed for the loaves were gone to the last crumb, and we were all as hungry as we had been before he came in.  The poor man,” said she, “did not even get a bit for himself.”  She held that the poor people were against the Volunteers.

The Volunteers still hold Jacob’s Biscuit Factory.  It is rumoured that a priest visited them and counselled surrender, and they replied that they did not go there to surrender but to be killed.  They asked him to give them absolution, and the story continues that he refused to do so—­but this is not (in its latter part) a story that can easily be credited.  The Adelaide Hospital is close to this factory, and it is possible that the proximity of the hospital, delays or hinders military operations against the factory.