This girl was quite young—­about nineteen years of age—­and was dressed in the customary shawl and apron of her class.  Her face was rather pretty, or it had that pretty slenderness and softness of outline which belong to youth.  But every sentence she spoke contained half a dozen indecent words.  Alas, it was only that her vocabulary was not equal to her emotions, and she did not know how to be emphatic without being obscene—­it is the cause of most of the meaningless swearing one hears every day.  She spoke to me for a minute, and her eyes were as soft as those of a kitten and her language was as gentle as her eyes.  She wanted a match to light a cigarette, but I had none, and said that I also wanted one.  In a few minutes she brought me a match, and then she recommenced her tireless weaving of six vile words into hundreds of stupid sentences.

About five o’clock the guns eased off of Kelly’s.

To inexperienced eyes they did not seem to have done very much damage, but afterwards one found that although the walls were standing and apparently solid there was no inside to the house.  From roof to basement the building was bare as a dog kennel.  There were no floors inside, there was nothing there but blank space; and on the ground within was the tumble and rubbish that had been roof and floors and furniture.  Everything inside was smashed and pulverised into scrap and dust, and the only objects that had consistency and their ancient shape were the bricks that fell when the shells struck them.

Rifle shots had begun to strike the house on the further side of the street, a jewellers’ shop called Hopkins & Hopkins.  The impact of these balls on the bricks was louder than the sound of the shot which immediately succeeded, and each bullet that struck brought down a shower of fine red dust from the walls.  Perhaps thirty or forty shots in all were fired at Hopkins’, and then, except for an odd crack, firing ceased.

During all this time there had been no reply from the Volunteers, and I thought they must be husbanding their ammunition, and so must be short of it, and that it would be only a matter of a few days before the end.  All this, I said to myself, will be finished in a few days, and they will be finished; life here will recommence exactly where it left off, and except for some newly-filled graves, all will be as it had been until they become a tradition and enter the imagination of their race.

I spoke to several of the people about me, and found the same willingness to exchange news that I had found elsewhere in the City, and the same reticences as regarded their private opinions.  Two of them, indeed, and they were the only two I met with during the insurrection, expressed, although in measured terms, admiration for the Volunteers, and while they did not side with them they did not say anything against them.  One was a labouring man, the other a gentleman.  The remark of the latter was: