ornaments, rang with his fame almost before the iron gate had olanged upon his footsteps. He came there by night, but had he come by day and seen how likeable the place was in spite of its being a prison, with its avenues of trees, its banks covered with shrubs, its gardens, lawns, and peacocks-he would certainly have wished that he could have been there as owner rather than as guest. There is a peacefulness about the place which would be delightful if it was not a little too monastic. You feel on seeing it for the first time that a few alterations might very suitably be made. Say that the walls were of old red brick rather than of stone, and covered with fruit trees, and that one or two superfluous buildings were removed to make way for enlargements of the lawns and garden. Say that you were to turf the long stone pathway, and call it Peacock Walk instead of Peaoook Lane, and supplant guard-rooms by lodges and cells by shrubberies. Then Rooks' Castle would be transformed into a very passable country house. As it is, there is unmistakably a sense of something lacking. The garden plots have no flowers, the peacocks no tails, while the warden himself is, at least during the greater part of the twentyfour hours, just a shade depressed. And well he may be, for the causes of his anxiety are numerous. In the first place there is the prison. Its walls are very high and its many. The guardians enormous gate which is the only means of entry and exit is heavily bolted and barred, -protected, moreover, on the inside by two sentinels with fixed bayonets who leap to the on-guard position the instant that it opens to admit & stranger, ready to run him through if he displays any sign of a hostile intention. Every weak spot and every dark corner has its armed warrior ready to give the alarm if a rescue should be attempted of the prisoners within. And there is a telephone ready at hand with which the warden can appeal for reinforcements in case of sudden surprise or unusual occurrence. But, on the other hand, the trees are thick on the outside of the prison, and though its surroundings may be rural, it does not enjoy an absolute solitude. And no one can tell how far the prisoners' confederates have access to the neighbouring buildings, one of which particularly, with its spacious garden, whose trees almost overhang the outer wall, might easily afford the necessary protection to desperate horde of intruders. With ropes and ladders they could swing themselves over the wall, overpower the sentries, and with a determined rush make themselves masters of the place under cover of the favouring night. Such is the spectacle that forms itself in the brain of the overwrought official as he tosses on his uneasy pillow. And then there are the prisoners themselves, a constant source of disquieting reflections. For one thing, they refuse to eat the food that is brought to them, and prefer, or say they prefer, to die rather than accept it. The result of this idiosynorasy is that a large number of them have been on the point of death for over a month, and the warden is often dragged out of bed, and robbed of one of his scanty snatches of sleep, with the news that so-and-so is close to his end, and has at the most but one more hour to live. But somehow or other the martyr always manages to survive a little longer. It is difficult to decide, however, whether the prisoners themselves are a greater cause of concern than their friends and relatives. These insist on visiting them, some scores every day, and at every hour of the day and night. The higher authorities make no objection to this, especially when the request is made on the plea that the sufferers cannot possibly live more than another four- and - twenty hours. It means incessant labour for the staff of the prison, as the only condition of their being allowed admission is that they shall be searched on arrival, to make sure that they do not carry any arms or seditious doou ments. And in addition to these, there are a quantity of people who, although they do not actually claim the right of entry, congregate outside every evening and sing, a proceeding which appears to afford them exquisite delight. They arrive about an hour before dusk, and they stay till about an hour after dark. This device has the great merit of publioity; it helps to draw the attention of the curious, and to stimulate their interest in what is going on inside. The enormous crowd proves an irresistible attraction to the wandering satellites of illustrated newspapers, who are not slow to profit by it. But this very fact contributes an additional cause of perplexity to the harassed janitors; for as well as being responsible for the safety of the prison and the safe custody of the prisoners, they are visited from time to time by eminent officials whom the green faction make the subject of attentions which would be extremely flattering if they were not at the same time inconvenient. These notabilities are regarded with so much interest that the ringleaders of the insurgents, although they already know a great deal about them, are keen to know more, and particularly to possess their photographs. Thus it happens that, as well as newspaper agents, there are other ardent photographers planted on the wall outside in a suitable position for exercising their oraft, whose object, although to all outward appearance perfectly innocent, is plainly evident to their intended victims. Of course, should they be arrested on suspicion, they have documents which ments which prove conclu in the pursuit of their lawful avocations. sively that they are engaged reminiscent of the Man in the Iron Mask. Everything outside seemed so gay and bright. But, as it was, he on whom all eyes were fixed had arrived in the castle the night before. There had been an unusual flutter among the authorities, for as well as the renowned leader of the green faction ten of his confederates were to be incarcerated along with him. All kinds of precautions had been taken to provide against the possibility of a rescue; even when he was safely inside the prison the difficulties created by such a situation were by no means ended. Rather they might be said to have only begun. Even if his arrest and trial were to prevent him from serving his party as a free man, he was resolved that at least they should be able to claim him as a martyr. He was courteous and ingratiating in manner, and bore himself with patience and dignity as one who thought himself not unworthy to change the course of history and tamper with the destinies of nations. The warden is assisted in his arduous duties by a guard, whose commander he must sometimes envy. If you were to enter Rooks' Castle, pass through its immense bastion, and climb up the moss-grown steps past the garden where the green and gold of the flaunting peacocks lends a brilliant touch of colour to otherwise drab surroundings, you would come at last to a spiral staircase leading up to the summit of a tower where the guard-oommander inhabits a small square room whence he can enjoy a view of the castle beneath, and the surrounding hills, through windows strongly protected by the massive bars of an iron grating. Here in the intervals of visiting the sentinels he spends his day reading books, writing letters, and wondering whether the troops have enough to eat. And it was on a fine morning in early autumn that an incoming guard commander wandered up the staircase and into this curious little stronghold in the tower to take over from him who had commanded the guard for the last twentyfour hours. It was a glorious morning, a fresh breeze blew from the sea, the trees on the hills all round looked fresh and radiant after the rain of the night before. It would have been almost impossible to believe that one was in a prison had it not been that the room itself was slightly There were frequent watchers after dark from the loophole in the wall from which the sentinel commands a view of the approaches to the gate. But nothing could be seen and nothing heard, save the hooting of the owls in the trees above the moat. Then an hour after midnight, and with surprising suddenness, a car flashed round the corner out of the main road and up the broad avenue. The great gate opened. A figure wrapped in a huge coat stepped into the gate room, silent, mysterious, impassive. The reinforcing guard would be withdrawn: nothing further would take place to-night: that was all he had to say; and having said it he went away as swiftly and as silently as he had come. The warden breathed a sigh of relief. The commander of the guard was left in a maze of mystification. Said the warden to him, "Well, I think a tot of whisky wouldn't do us any harm, and then an hour or two of sleep." The guard - commander concurred, It was a cold inolement night, and in the warden's snug little room with a fire and the cheerful twinkling of the lights, and above all the whisky - bottle and the soda siphon, the warden, reserved and diffident during the day, relapsed into an easy vein of eheery conversation. He was even ready to diseuss the possible reasons of this sudden and entirely unexpected change of plan. . . . They might have sent him away to some other place, or they might not have the necessary means of transport,-surely it was not possible they could have released him, or perhaps—well, he had better not say that.... Blessed be the immortal gods who caused the vine to grow to gladden men's hearts and to unloosen their tongues. At The next morning the mystery was solved. The insurgent chieftain had stood his trial the day before, and had been taken away without returning to the Castle of Rooks. an early hour some time before daybreak, attended by one trusted official and lighted by a solitary candle, he had come down the stairs from the room where he slept, and entered a oar that bore him away on a long journey. The almost solitary witness of his departure described later how he had gone to see him as he was going to bed the night before, and expressed the tumult of his feelings as he looked for the first and perhaps the last time on the man who had signed the death-warrant of his old friend and former chief. It was a large bare room where the prisoner spent his last night in the green island. On the wall was a curious document called a rhymesheet. And this was the rhyme: "O what shall the man full of sin do, Whose heart is as cold as a stone, he black owl looking in at his window, And he, on his death-bed, alone, "Whist, man!" said the priest, "be done with your politics, and get on with your sins." A state of civil war produces through the woods; on Wedthis very equivocal condition nesdayof affairs, that the defenders of the established government are marked men known to everybody, whereas those whom it is their duty to suppress have the advantage of being concealed. It also enables hot-heads and hooligans to continue the excesses which they perpetrate under normal conditions, while persuading themselves and other people that they do these things for a legitimate political object. Even those who would disapprove of their doings, if this pretext could not be put forward, are very liable to overlook them at present. And the following story, though the writer refuses to vouch for its absolute veracity, clearly indicates the attitude of mind: A priest was hearing the confession of one of his parishioners. "Father," said the penitent to him, "on Sunday I laid an ambush with several more of my friends, and we killed three constables; on Monday I crept up behind a soldier who wasn't looking and blew his brains out; on Tuesday I laid wait with two other accomplices and killed two soldiers who were passing It is natural that these people are always ready to answer to the call of the Sinn Fein recruiting sergeant. The routine of regular work makes only a very mild appeal to them; they are fond of adventure, and not scrupulous about the means of gaining their ends. And they are specially adapted to the particular form of guerilla fighting now in vogue in a country which, though not exactly in a state of war, is neither entirely at peace. Their favourite forms of activity are ambushes, in which bodies of men well concealed lie in wait for groups of two or three, or even for single persons, or raids upon mails and convoys. These ambushes are nearly always carefully prepared in well-chosen spots, where the natural features of the ground lend themselves to the scheme. Often, if they intend to waylay a vehicle on the road, they cut down a tree and make a barrier, so that the driver, if completely unsuspeoting, will run blindly into it, and the occupants can be |