Let us ^|1draw now talk straight turkey as man to man ^|afor while the ear may sometimes believe others the eye finds it devilish hard now & again even to believe itself^a|. Drawing^1| draw nearer to since if it after all has met with misfortune ^|1& see & take our slant at^1| all there may remain to be seen. One cannot help noticing how ^|1about rather more than^1| ½ of the lines run from N to S and the rest of them from E to W ^|1for tiny tot ^|abeside other incunabula^a| as it is it has its cardinal points for all that^1|. These ruled barriers along which the traced words run, march, walk, collide, stumble, stumble up again in comparative safety seem to have been drawn first of all in a pretty checker with lampblack & a blackthorn. Such crossing is antechristian, of course. ^|1The use of the ^|ahomeborn^a| cudgel in caligraphy^|a, it is seriously believed,^a| shows a aº clear advance from savagery to barbarism.^1| Some think the intention may have been geodetic, ^|1others cannier ones^1| domestic economy. Another thing, in addition to the original sand, pounce powder, or soft rag used it has acquired accretions of terricious matter whilst loitering in the past. The teastain is a little study all to itself and its importance in establishing the identity of the writer complex (for if the hand was one the minds were more than so) will be best appreciated by remembering that both before & after the battle of the Boyne it was the custom not to sign letters always. Why^|1, pray,^1| sign anything as long as every word, letter, penstroke, space is a perfect signature in its own way. A true friend is known infinitely more easily & better into the bargain by his personalit personal touch, habits of ^|1full^1| dress or undress,
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movements, response to appeals to charity than by his boots, say.

Now while ^|1in our ^|awee^a| free state^1| we may have our irremovable doubts as to the whole sense of the ^|1lot^1|, the interpretation of any phrase in ^|1it the whole^1|, the meaning of every word ^|1of a phrase^1| so far deciphered out of it ^|1however ^|ablank unfettered^a| our Irish Daily independence^1| we must ^|1have vaunt^1| no idle dubiosity as about its authorship and authoritativeness. On the face of it & to a rough mind the document is a thing once for all done & there you are somewhere & finished in a certain time be it a day or a year or even supposing it should eventually turn out to be a long stretch of goodness alone knows how many days or years. But anyhow somebody somehow somewhere wrote it, wrote it all, wrote it all down & there you are full stop. ^|1Ah yes O undoubtedly yes^1| but one who deeply thinks will always bear in his mind that this downright there you are & there it is is only all in his eye. Why?

Because^|1, if it goes to that,^1| every person, place & thing ^|1in it mentioned ^|aby name^a| in the telephone directory^1| and was moving and changing every part of the time: the travelling inkpot, the hare & turtle pen & paper, the continually more & less intermisunderstanding minds of the anticollaborators, the ^|1as time went on as it will^1| variously inflected, differently pronounced, otherwise spelled, changeably meaning vocable scriptsigns. No it is not a
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^|1miseffectual^1| riot of blots & blurs & bars & balls & hoops & wriggles: it only looks as like it as damn it, &^|1, sure,^1| we ought ^|1really^1| to rest thankful that we have even a written on withº dried ink paper piece of paper ^|1at all^1| to show for ourselves after all it has gone through & ^|1by all means^1| cling to it as with drowning hands, hoping all the while that things will begin to clear up a bit ^|1one way or another^1| within the next quarter of an hour ^|1and be hanged to them^1| as ten to one they will^|1, too,^1| as they ought to.

For who thatº scrutinising marvels at those indignant whiplashloops, those so prudently bolted or blocked rounds, the touching reminiscence of an incomplete trail, or dropped final, the gossipy threadreels, the a round thousand whirligig glorioles ambiembellishing the majuscule of Earwicker, the ^|1steady^1| monology of the interiors, the pardonable confusion ^|1owing^1| to which the pees with their caps awry are quite as often as not taken to be kews with their tails in their mouths, the toomuchness the sudden petulance of some capitalised middle, the curt witty darts never quite just at the truth letter, a word as cunningly hidden in its maze of traceries as a fieldmouse in a nest of coloured ribbons, then an utterly unexpected
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sinistrogyric return to a particular sore point in the past, ^|1those wideopen doubleyous seated with such determination ^|areminding one irresistibly of nature at her naturalest^a| while the fretful eff (used ^|aalways ^|bby our copyist^b|a| as revise) stalks all over the page, ^|abroods amid the verbiage, ^|xgaunt,^x|a| stands in the window margin ^|afrowning, paces jerkily to & fro flinging phrases here, there,^a| & returns with a suggestion, dragging its shoestring,^1| the innocent exhibitionism of those frank yet capricious underlinings, that strange exotic serpentine since properly banished from our scripture which ever longer and more headstrong seems to grow & swell before our eyes under the writer's hand, ^|1|athat pointedly cancelled the studious omission of the year no in from the date, the one & only time ^|x11, 5^thx| when the writer seems at least to have understood the beauty of restraint,^a| the cruciform postscript from which ^|abasia or smaller ^|b& shorter^b|a| oscula have been ^|acarefully^a| scraped away plainly inspired by the tenebrous τunc page of the Book of Kells (and ^|athen^a| it need not be forgotten that there are exactly 3 ^|apanels squads^a| of candidates for the cross awaiting their turn ^|achugged in their 3 blank^a| in the marginal panels ^|athere^a|, ^|athen provided for such hanging parties^a| when we two was ^|athen^a| enough for anybody, ^|astarting with old Matthew himself, as he ^|bthen^b| said himself with great distinction then, just as since then people ^|bspeaking^b| have fallen into the habit ^|bwhen speaking to a person^b| of saying two is company when the third person is the person ^|bdarkly spoken^b| of, and then that last labiolingual basium might be read as a suavium if whoever the embracer was happened to wrote with ^|bher his^b| (or her) tongue in his (or her) cheek as the case may have been then,^a|1| the toomuchness and fartoomanyness of all ^|1those them^1| fourlegged ems, the penelopean patience of its last paraphe tailed by a leaping lasso — who thus at this marvelling will not press on to see a the feminine vaulting libido of those interbranching sex upandinsweeps sternly controlled and easily repersuaded by the uniform matteroffactness of a meandering male fist.

^|1Duff-Moeggli Duff-Muggli (who may be quoted by arrangement) first^1| called this kind of a ^|1paddygoeasy^1| partnership the odyssean or heterochiric complex after the wellinformed observation ^|1made ^|a|bindependent of quite apart from^b| him,^a| by Tung-Toyd^1| that in the case of the littleknown periplous poem popularly associated with that name a Punic admiralty report has been cleverly capsized & then saucily reissued as a dodecanesian baedeker of an
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every-tale-a-treat-in-itself variety which could hope satisfactorily to tickle the gander as well as the goose.

The true identity of the two persons in the complex came to light in a curious way. The original document was what is known as unbreakable script, that is to say, it had no signs of punctuation of any sort. On holding it against a lit rush, however, it ^|1was seen responded most remarkably to the ^|alight test silent query ^|bof ^|cthe our^c| world's oldest light^b|a| & showed itself^1| to be pierced or punctuated (in the university sense of the term) by numerous stabs & gashes made by a pronged instrument. These paper wounds, four in type, were gradually but correctly understood to mean stop, please stop, do please stop & O do please stop respectively, and investigation showed that they were provoked by the fork of a professor at the breakfast table, professionally piqued to introduce a notion of time upon a plane surface by puncturing holes in space. Deeply religious by nature it was rightly suspected that such ire could not have been ^|1directed against invoked by upon^1| the ancestral spirit of one openly worshipped by him
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regularly once a week as our first boy's best friend and when it was at last detected that the fourth or most drastic jab was more recurrent wherever the script was clear and the term terse & that these two were the exact spots carefully selected for her perforations by Dame Partlet on the dungheap reluctantly the theory of the jabbering ape ^|1from Oxford^1| was hotly dropped and ^|1its his^1| place usurped by that odious and even today insufficiently despised notetaker Shem the Penman.