"GOD SAVE THE KING!"

How would the revolutionaries reply? Rumors ran riot. The Sinn Fein
volunteers would pit themselves against His Majesty's troops. The streets
would be red again. The belief that the meeting would be held in spite of
the proclamation was supported by a statement on green-lettered posters
that appeared later next the British dictum:

"LORD MAYOR REQUESTS GOOD ORDER AT RECEPTION!"

This plea was followed by a paragraph asking that the people attending the
reception would not allow themselves to be provoked into disorder by the
British military. Then there was the concluding exclamation:

"GOD SAVE IRELAND!"

On my way to the Sinn Fein headquarters in Harcourt street, I passed the
Mansion House of the Lord Mayor and found two long-coated Dublin Military
Police stripping the new wet poster from the yellow walls. When I arrived
at Number 6, Harcourt street, I saw black-clad Mrs. Sheehy-Sheffington, in
somewhat agitated absorption of thought, coming down the worn steps of the
old Georgian house. In the upper back room, earnest young secretaries
worked in swift silence. One of them, a curly-haired girl with her mouth
o-ed about a cigarette, puffed unceasingly. At last Harry Boland, secretary
of Sinn Fein, entered.

"The council decides tonight," he admitted. His eyes were bright and
faraway like one whose mind is on a coming crisis. When I told him I would
drop in again to hear the decision, he protested that they would be at it