Instead of stopping the steamrolling until all mains and pipes had been relaid at a sufficient depth to resist the rolling, they solemnly proceeded to roll, burst, and mend from one end of the main street to the other, to the huge delight of all the local plumbers, who also had votes.

Luckily the money was exhausted by the time the main street was finished, and though the greater part of the surface was excellent, the ridges made by digging up the pipes at intervals would break the axle of an unsuspecting stranger's car, to the great benefit of the local garages.

The police barracks at Ballybor are situated in a "cul-desac" off the main street, at the corners of which stand the principal hotel and a bank, and all cars going to or from the barracks must pass this corner. Word was brought to Cormac in his mountain dug-out that his brother left Ballybor Barracks early every morning with a Crossley full of Cadets, and that they spent the whole day and often most of the night searching the surrounding country for him. Before leaving Ballybor he had witnessed the steam-rolling comic opera, and bicycling by night to Ballybor, he lay up during the day,

VOL. CCX.-NO. MCCLXX.

Human nature always seems to regard the digging up of a street in the light of a huge joke, and during his work Cormac was not only chaffed by the bank manager and the hotel loafers, but by the police themselves. When it was dusk he was joined by a Volunteer with a charge of gelignite, which had been raided from a Government ship off the southeast coast and brought to the West by car, and the two proceeded to lay a contact-mine in the centre of the road. They then filled in the earth, returned the tools and barrow to the plumber, and bicycled back to the mountains.

While Cormac was busy laying his mine, Dominic and Blake were poring over an Ordnance-map in the barracks not sixty yards away. Having come to the conclusion that it was quite useless to search the countryside piecemeal, and hearing a rumour of what was going on in the mountains through one of the forced food contractors having made a bitter complaint to a passing police patrol, they were now planning to surround the southern half of the Slievenamoe Mountains, and organising a great drive, and the next two days were spent working out the details.

About 9 A.M. a mineral-water

H 2

lorry, in order to turn, backed up the cul-de-sac, and the mine being well and truly laid, disappeared in a sheet of flame, wrecking the bank and hotel. Hardly had the sound of the explosion died away, and before the police left the barracks to investigate, every young man in Ballybor of the shopkeeper class had his bicycle out and was off as hard as he could pedal. A Volunteer greatly resembles a mountain hare: directly the hunt is up he makes at top speed for high ground, and the harder you press both the faster they leg it up the mountains. Blake and Dominic managed to control their men, and no reprisals followed, the only arrest being the unfortunate plumber who had lent his outfit to Cormac, and whose bicycle had been "borrowed" by an agitated shop-boy.

At the present time a big drive in the West presents great difficulties. Very few, often none, of the R.I.C. or Auxiliaries know anything of the many wild and mountainous parts in their districts, and the soldiers are invariably complete strangers.

To reconnoitre the ground beforehand is out of the question, and it is difficult to induce reliable guides to act.

The part of the mountains Blake and Dominic had selected to drive lay about nine miles due east of Ballybor, divided by a deep pass from the remainder of the range to the north, and ending in a wild

rocky valley intersected by the Owenmore river to the south, and the total area to be covered was about eighteen square miles of mountains, glens, cliffs, and bogs. It was not possible to start operations before 3 A.M. (the month being August), and they would have to stop soon after 11 P.M. (summer time), which gave them roughly twenty hours to beat the eighteen square miles.

Taking the total number of troops at their disposal, Blake divided them into groups of six, giving them nearly a hundred groups. Then Dominic picked out from a contoured Ordnance-map the same number of points surrounding the mountains, from all of which there was a good view and field of fire, and it was arranged that as many groups as possible should have either Vickers machine-gun or a Lewis gun.

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The actual drive was to be carried out by the police. The Cadets under Dominic were to start from the north end in a crescent formation and advance towards the highest point, which lay nearly in the centre of the area, while the R.I.C. under Blake were to advance from the south.

Dominic knew every yard of the mountains, having shot grouse there with his brother since boyhood, but the difficulty was to procure a guide for Blake's party, none of whom had ever set foot on the mountains. With much persuasion, however, Dominic at

last induced a man, who had been one of the mac Nessa's game-watchers on the mountains for years, to act as guide. This man had to be promised a large sum of money, and to save him from the revenge of Sinn Fein, it was arranged that directly after the drive he should be safely got away to enlist in the British Army under an assumed name, and, if he wished, be sent straight off to India.

All officers and N.C.O.'s were given maps showing the position of every group marked, and it was arranged that the police should be in position at 3 A.M. and the troops half an hour later. A few days before the date fixed for the drive Dominic and his Auxiliaries disappeared from Ballybor, and it was given out that they had gone to Co. Cork.

Sharp at 3 A.M., on a perfect August day, the drive began. Dominic and the Cadets had to start from the shores of a large lake lying in a cup at the top of the pass, and climb a thousand feet before reaching the first valley in the mountains. At the top they halted for a breather and to admire the wonderful view. To the east the summer sun was fast rising, all around them stretched miles of heather-clad hills, and away to the north-west lay the sea, a pearly grey-blue in the fast growing light.

After a rest Dominic got his men into formation, spreading them out as far as possible without losing touch, while he

kept a small party in the rear to go to any threatened point where the gunmen might try to break through the cordon. The Cadets had brought their signallers with them, equipped with a heliograph and flags, who remained with the reserve party.

On reaching higher ground Dominic could see with his glasses the small groups of soldiers taking up their positions, while far away in the plain to the eastward the Owenmore river wound like a blue thread through the dark bogland. A Cadet on his left nearly walked on a pack of grouse, which swung righthanded, passing within twenty yards of Dominic, and reminding him vividly of other days.

Very soon the Cadets began to feel the heat of the sun, and the hard going began to tell on several of them. Sitting in a Crossley is bad training for walking a grouse mountain.

After going about a mile and a half a party of men were seen in front making eastward at full speed down a valley, the end of which Dominic knew was held by a group of soldiers with a machine-gun. Halting his men, he then brought his right wing well round so as to cut off the gunmen's retreat to the west should they attempt to break back.

The fleeing gunmen were soon lost sight of in dead ground, but presently the sound of firing was heard from the far end of the valley, and after a time the gunmen were seen

retreating across the Cadets' front, and making as hard as they could for the west side of the mountains.

At this point Blake's men came in sight from the south, and quickly getting in touch with the Cadets' right wing, completed the cordon. The gunmen, seeing that they were surrounded and all retreat cut off, split up into two parties, took up positions on two kopjes, and waited for the attack.

As a frontal attack would have entailed heavy loss, and seeing that there was another kopje on Blake's side which would command and enfilade the gunmen's positions, Dominic ordered the Cadets to pin the gunmen down by their fire, and at the same time sent a signaller to Blake telling him to occupy the commanding kopje. This Blake did, and also sent to the nearest group of soldiers for a machine-gun.

The fight lasted for two hours, and though the gunmen were always subject to a hot fire, and several times a man was seen to spring into the air and collapse in the heather, yet they stuck it gamely until the machine-gun was brought up and opened a heavy fire on both kopjes; the remaining gunmen then stood up and put up their hands.

On the two kopjes the police found twelve dead gunmen and twenty-eight prisoners, eighteen of whom were wounded. And amongst the dead Dominic found Cormac, shot through the heart.

After arranging for the burial of the dead (with the exception of Cormac, who was carried down the mountain-side on a stretcher) and the removal of the prisoners, Dominic took a party of Cadets to search some caves which he knew of about half a mile to the south-west. Here, as he expected, he found that the gunmen had been living in comparative comfort. One cave had been used as a living-room and contained chairs and tables, while two smaller inner ones were fitted up with bunks in tiers like a Boche dugout, and had heather for bedding.

Towards evening the wornout Cadets got back to their Crossleys on the pass road which ran along the north shore of the lake; and after leaving a party with a searchlight mounted on a tender to stop any stray gunmen escaping during the night on bicycles by the road to the east, Dominic started for Murrisk in a Crossley with his brother's body.

Many an evening the two brothers had driven home together over the same road after a happy day's grouse-shooting, never dreaming that their last journey together would be to bring Cormac's body to the home of their ancestors.

The mac Nessa met the party in the great hall of Murrisk, and his ancestors looking down from the walls must surely have thought that they were back again in their own times of everlasting war and sudden death.

THE great Queen Elizabeth is called in England to this day the good Queen Bess. And a good as well as a great Queen she was to the English. When they were fighting for their lives, and, what perhaps they valued more, their religion, against Philip of Spain and the Spanish Inquisition, she was the soul of the struggle. As she told her soldiers assembled at Tilbury, though but a weak woman, she had "the stomach of a king, and of a King of England too"; and her superb courage did more than aught else to inspire her subjects to singe the Spanish King's beard in his own ports, and to destroy his Invincible Armada in the open

sea.

But in her own mind she was Queen only of England, and her care and love for men began and ended with the English. For the Irishry, who were the Spaniard's friends and the Englishman's enemies, she had no use or pity, though she was also Queen of Ireland. Her love of her English followed them wherever they went. To her, unlike her successors, the Englishman in Ireland was as much her care as the Englishman in England. She strove her utmost to protect, to prosper, and to instruct him. And so for the last purpose, she

established for his benefit the College of the Holy Trinity in Dublin, which was to be the mother of a University. The College and the University, however, are still one; and Trinity remains not merely the silent but the single sister of Oxford and Cambridge.

During the three or four centuries since its foundation Trinity has had many eccentric and many distinguished students; but, as but, as a rule, its eccentric students were not distinguished, and its distinguished students were not eccentric. Archbishop Ussher and Bishop Berkeley, Congreve, Burke, Grattan, Curran, Plunket, Tom Moore, Charles Lever, Earl Cairns, and Lecky are some of its alumni of whom most of the world has heard ; but they were very like ordinary students, except in the matter of brains and sometimes of application. Most of the eccentric students' names have long since passed into oblivion; but some are remembered either because their peculiarities were amazing or their parts were. One of these, whose parts were great, but whose whose peculiarities were astounding, has found his way not merely into the College history, but into the world's fiction. He figures in Charles Lever's 'Charles O'Malley'