their feeling of detachment was still so complete that they would have
betted on the business as if it had been a horse race or a dog fight.

Many English troops have been landed each night, and it is believed that
there are more than sixty thousand soldiers in Dublin alone, and that
they are supplied with every offensive contrivance which military art
has invented.

Merrion Square is strongly held by the soldiers. They are posted along
both sides of the road at intervals of about twenty paces, and their
guns are continually barking up at the roofs which surround them in the
great square. It is said that these roofs are held by the Volunteers
from Mount Street Bridge to the Square, and that they hold in like
manner wide stretches of the City.

They appear to have mapped out the roofs with all the thoroughness that
had hitherto been expended on the roads, and upon these roofs they are
so mobile and crafty and so much at home that the work of the soldiers
will be exceedingly difficult as well as dangerous.

Still, and notwithstanding, men can only take to the roofs for a short
time. Up there, there can be no means of transport, and their
ammunition, as well as their food, will very soon be used up. It is the
beginning of the end, and the fact that they have to take to the roofs,
even though that be in their programme, means that they are finished.

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. Café. Its Chinese-like