Shem is as short for Shemus as Jem is joky for Jacob. A few toughnecks are still getatable who pretend that aboriginally he was of respectable ^|s5connections stemming^s5| (an inlaw to Mr Bbyrdwood de Trop Bloggg was among his most distant connections) but every honest to goodness man in the land of today knows that his back life will not stand being written about in black and white. Putting truth and untruth together a shot may be made at what this hybrid actually was like to look at. Shem's bodily getup, it seems, included: an adze of a skull, an eighth of an eye, the whole of a nose, one all false arm, fortytwo hairs off his ^|5crown uncrown^5|, eighteen to his mock lip, a quintet from his chin, the wrong shoulder higher than the right, all ears, not a foot to stand on, a handful of thumbs, a blind stomach, a deaf heart, a loose liver, two fifths of two buttocks, a stone and a half, a manroot of all evil, a salmonkelt's thinskin, eelsblood in his cold toes, a bladder Tristended — so much so that young Master Shemmy at the very dawn of history seeing himself such and such, when playing with words in his nursery garden, asked of all his little brothron and sweestureens the first riddle of the universe: When is a man not a man? telling them take their time and wait till the tide stops (for from the first his day was a fortnight) and offering the prize of a bittersweet crab to the winner. One said when the heavens are quakers, a second said when Bohemeand lips, a third said when he, no, when, hold hard a jiffy, when he is a gnawstick
{f10, 135}
and detarmined to, the next one said when the angel of death kicks the bucket of life, still another said when the wine is wife, and still another when lovely wooman stoops to conk him, one of the littlest said me, me, Sem, when pappa papered the harbour, still one said when you are old I'm grey fall full of sleep, and still another when wee deader walkner, and another when he is just only after having being semisized, another when yea he hath no mananas, and one when dose pigs they begin now that they will flies up intil the looft. All were wrong, so Shem himself took the cake, the correct solution being — all give it up? —: When he is a Sham.

Shem was a sham and a low sham and his lowness creeped out first via foodstuffs. So low was he that he preferred Gibsen's teatime salmon tinned, as inexpensive as pleasing, to the plumpest roeheavy lax or the friskiest parr or smolt troutlet that ever was gaffed between Leixlip and Island Bridge and many was the time he repeated in his botulism that no junglegrown pineapple ever smacked like the whoppers you shook out of Ananias' cans. None of your inchthick blueblooded Balaclava beefsteaks or juicejelly legs of molten mutton or greasily gristly grunters' goupons or slice upon slab of luscious goosebosom with lump after load of plumpudding stuffing all aswim in a
{f39, 171}
swamp of bogoak gravy for him! He even seceded away by himself and became a farsoonerite, saying he would far sooner muddle through the hash of lentils in Europe than meddle with Ireland's split little pea. Once when in a state of hopelessly helpless intoxication he strove to lift a citron peel to either nostril, hiccupping apparently impromptued by his glottal stop, that he could live for ever by the smell, as the citr, as the cedron, like a cedar, of the founts, on mountains, with lemon on, of Lebanon. O, the lowness of him was beneath all up to that sunk to! No likedbylike firewater or firstserved firstshot or gutburn gin or honest liberal unionist beer either. O dear no! Instead the tragic jester sobbed himself sick of life on some sort of a wheywhinging rhubarbarous yellagreen applejack squeezed from sour grapefruice and, to hear him twixt his sedimental cupslips when he had absorbed too many gourds of it retching off to his almost as low withswillers, who always knew notwithstanding when they had had enough and were rightly indignant at the wretch's hospitality when they
{f10, 136}
found to their horror they could not carry another drop, it came straight from the noble white fat, openwide sat, her why hide that, the winevat, of the most serene archduchess (if she's a duck she's a douches, snot her fault, nowisit?), artstouchups funny you're grinning at, fancy you're in her yet, Fanny Urinia. Ain't that swell, hey? Talk about lowness! Any dog's quantity of it visibly oozed out thickly from this dirty little blacking beetle, for the very first instant the Tulloch-Turnbull girl with her kodak spotted the as yet unremuneranded national apostate, who was cowardly gun and camera shy, taking what he fondly thought was a short cut to Ameriga, after having buried a friend not so long before, by the wrong goods exeunt into Patatapapaveri's, fruiterers and musical florists, she knew he was a bad fast man by his walk on the spot.

Around that time one generally hoped or at any rate suspected he would early turn out badly, develop hereditary pulmonary T.B. and do for himself one good time. Nay, one pelting night blanketed folk, hearing a coarse song and splash off Eden Quay, sighed and rolled over, sure all was up, but, though he fell heavily and locally into debt, not even then could such an antinomian be true to type. With the ^|5foreign^5| devil's leave the born fraud diddled even death. You see, chaps, he was low. All the time he kept on treasuring with condign satisfaction each and every crumb of trektalk, covetous of his neighbour's word, and if ever, during a conversazione commoted in the nation's interest, delicate hints were thrown out to him touching his evil courses by some wellwishers vainly pleading by scriptural arguments with the opprobrious papist about what about trying
{f10, 137}
to brace up and be a men insteed of a dem scrounger, desh it all, such as: Pray, what is
{f39, 173}
the meaning of that continental expression, if you ever came across it, we think it is a word transpiciously like canaille? or: Did you anywhere, kennel, on your gullible's travels or during your rural troubadouring happen to stumble upon a certain gay young nobleman answering to the name of Low Swine who lives on loans and is ^|5thirtyfive furtivefree^5| yours of age? without one sign of haste, like the supreme prig he was, he would pull a vacant landlubber's face and then, lisping, the prattlepate parnella, to kill time, and swatting his deadbest to think what under the canopies of God would any decent son of a bitch think, begin to tell all the intelligentsia admitted to that conclamazzione (since appreciable physicians, trusted lawyers, belfry politicians, philanthropists sitting on as many boards round the peninsula at the same time as possible) the whole lifelong story of his entire low existence, abusing his deceased ancestors wherever the sods were and one moment blowing great blunderguns about his farfamed fine Poppamore, Mr Humhum, and another moment crowing three jeers for his rotten little ghost of a Peppybeg, Mr Himmyshimmy, giving unsolicited testimony on behalf of the absent as glib as eaveswater, to those present (who meanwhile with increasing lack of interest in his semantics, allowed various subconscious smiles to drivel slowly across their faces), unconsciously explaining, for inkstands, with a meticulosity bordering on the insane, the various meanings of all the different foreign parts of speech he misused and cuttlefishing every lie unshrinkable about all the
{f39, 174}
other people in the story leaving out, of course, foreconsciously, the simple word and person they had cornered him about until there was not a snoozer among them but was utterly undeceived in the heel of the reel by the recital of the rigmarole.

It went without saying that the cull disliked anything anyway approaching a plain straightforward standup or knockdown row and as often as he was called in to umpire any octagonal argument among slangwhangers the accomplished washout always used to rub shoulders with the last
{f10, 138}
speaker and agree to every word as soon as half uttered: your servant, good, quite true, I'm yoush, also good, quiso, your sulphur: and then at once focus his whole unbalanced attention upon the next octagonist who managed to catch a listener's eye, asking and imploring him out of his piteous onewinker whether there was anything in the world he could do to please him and to overflow his tumbletantaliser for him yet once more. One kailcannon night as very recently as some thousand rains ago he was therefore treated with what closely resembled personal violence, being kicked all unsuspectingly through the deserted village of Tumblin-on-the-Leafy from ^|5Mr Vanhomrigh's houseº at^5| 82 Mabbot's Mall as far as ^|5the lefthand eastend corner of Europa Parade Green Patchº beyond the brickfields of Salmon Pool^5| by rival teams of argumentalists counter quicklimers who finally, as rahilly they had been deteened out rawther laetich, thought they had better be streaking for home one and all disgustedly, instead of kicking him back and awake, reconciled (though they were as jealous as could be cullions about all the truffles they had brought on him) to a friendship, fast and furious, which merely arose out of the noxious pervert's perfect lowness. Again there was a hope that people,
{f39, 175}
looking on him with the contempt of the contemptibles, after first giving him a roll in the dirt might pity and forgive him, if properly deloused, but the pleb was born a Quicklow and sank alowing till he stank out of sight.

Darkies never done tug that coon out to play flesh and blood games same as piccaninnies play all day, those old games we used to play with old Joe kicking her behind and before and the yellow girl kicking him behind old Joe,
{f39, 176}
games like Put the wind up the peeler, Hat in the ring, Healy Baba and the forty thieves, Soldier, soldier, will you marry me?, Sheila Harnett and her cow, I seen the toothbrush with Pat Farrell, Here's the fat to grease the priest's boots. Now it is notoriously known how on that surprisingly bloody Unity Sunday, when the grand germogall allstar bout was gaily the rage between our fightingmen extraordinary and Irish eyes of welcome were smiling daggers down their back, rank funk getting the better of him the scut in a bad fit of pyjamas fled like a leveret for his bare lives pursued by the scented curses of all the village belles and, without having struck one blow, corked himself up tight in his inkbottle house, badly the worse for boosegas, where he collapsed carefully under a bedtick from Switzer's, his face enveloped into a dead warrior's telemac,
{f10, 140}
with a whotwaterwottle
{f39, 177}
at his feet, to stoke his energy of waiting, moaning feebly that his pawdry's purgatory was more than a nigger man could bear, hemiparalysed by all the shemozzle (Daily Maily, fullup lace! Holy Maly, mothelup Joss!), his cheeks and trousers changing colour every time a gat croaked. How is that for low, ladies and laymen? Why, whole continents rang with this lowness! Sheols of houris in chems upon divans (revolted stellas vespertine among them) at a bare (O!) mention exclaimed: Fish!

But would anyone, short of a madhouse, believe it? Neither of those clean little cherubum, Nero or Nobookishonester himself, ^|5never ever^5| nursed such a spoiled opinion of his monstrous marvellosity as did this mental and moral defective (here perhaps at ^|5his really lowest the vanessance of his lownest^5|) who was known to belch rather than brag on one occasion, while drinking heavily of spirits, to an interlocutor a latere he used to pal around with, one Davy Dunn, in the porchway of a gipsy's bar (Shem always blaspheming, so holy writ, Billy, he would try, old Belly, and pay this one ^|5manjack^5| congregant of his four soups every lass of nexmouth, Bolly, as a taste for a storik's fortytooth to listen out, ony twenny minnies moe, Bully, his Ballade Imaginaire, which was to be called Wine, Woman and Waterclocks by Maistre Sheames de la Plume, some most dreadful stuff in a murderous handwriting) that he was awoopf aware of no other shaggyspick, other Shakhisbeard, either prexactly unlike his polar andthisishis or procisely the seems as woops as what he fancied or guessed the sames as he was himself. After the thorough fright he got that bloody day, though every doorpost in muchtried Lucalizod was smeared with generous gore and every free for all cobbleway slippery with the blood of heroes crying
{f10, 141}
to heaven for others and noahs and culverts agush with tears of joy, our low waster never had the common baalamb's pluck to stir out and about the compound while everyone else of the city throng, slashers and sliced alike, waded around, chanting the Gillooly chorus, heads up, on their bonafide avocations while happy belongers to the fairer sex on their usual quest for higher things went stonestepping their bickerstaffs across the rainbow bridge set up over the slop by Messrs a charitable government, for the only once he did take a tompeep through a threedraw eighteen-hawkspower telescoop out of his westernmost keyhole, spitting at the impenetrable weather, with an eachway hope in his shivering soul of finding out for himself whether true conciliation was forging ahead or falling back and why he got the charm of his optical life when he found himself at pointblank range blinking down the barrel of an irregular revolver of the bulldog with a purpose pattern handled by an unknown quarreler who, supposedly, had been told off to shade and shoot shy Shem should the shit show his shiny shnout out awhile to look facts in the face before being holed and creased by six or a dozen of the gayboys.

What was this interestingly low human type really at? The answer is: a drug and drunkery addict growing megalomane at a loose end. This explains the litany of septuncial lettertrumpets, honorific, highpitched,
{f10, 142}
erudite, neoclassical, which he so loved as patricianly to manuscribe after his name. It would have diverted, if ever seen, the shuddersome spectacle of this semidemented zany amid the inspissated grime of his glaucous den making believe to read his eminently unreadable ^|5bluebook Blue Book of Eccles^5| (even yet it can't be repeated!), turning over three sheets at a time, telling himself delightedly that every splurge on the vellum he blundered over was an aisling vision more gorgeous than the one before, a rose cottage by the sea for nothing for ever, a ladies' tryon hosiery raffle at liberty, a sewerful of guineagold wine and sickcylinder oysters worth a billion a bite^|5:,^5| an entire operahouse of enthusiastic noblewomen flinging every coronetcrimsoned stitch they had off at his probscenium, one after the others, when, egad, sir, he sang the topnote in ^|5After the Ball Deal Lil Shemlockup Yellin^5| (geewhiz, jew ear that far! soap ewer! juice like a boyd!) for fully five minutes infinitely better than Barton McGuckin, with a scrumptious cocked hat and three green ^|5trinity trimmityº^5| plumes on his head and a ^|5dean's^5| crozier that he won for falling first over the hurdles, madam, in the odder hand, but what with the murky light, the botchy print, the tattered cover, the jigjagged page, the fumbling fingers, the foxtrotting fleas, the lieabed lice, the scum on his tongue, the drop in his eye, the lump in his throat, the drink in his pottle, the itch in his palm, the wail of his wind, the grief from his nose, the dig in his ribs, the age of his arteries, the weight of his breath, the fog of his brainfag, the tic of his conscience, the height of his rage, the gush of his fundament, the fire in his gorge, the tickle of his tail, the rats in his garret, the hullabaloo and the dust in his ears, since it took him a month to steal a march he was hardset to memorise more than a word a week. Was there ever heard of such lowdown blackguardism? Positively it
{f10, 143}
woollies one to think over it. Yet the bumpersprinkler used to boast aloud alone to himself when Hoy was corrected with the blackboard
{f39, 181}
how he had been toed out of all the schicker families of the Klondykers from Pioupiouland, Swabspays, the land of Nod, Shruggers' Country, Pension Danubierhome and Barbaropolis, who had settled in the capital city after its metropoliarchialisation, ordered off the gorgeous premises in most cases on account of his smell which all the cookmaids objected to as resembling the smell that came out of the sink. Instead of chuthoring those model households plain wholesome pothooks (a thing he never possessed of his Nigerian own) what do you think Vulgariano did but study with stolen fruit how cutely to copy all their various styles of signature so as one day to utter a colossal forged cheque on the public for his own private profit until, as just related, the Dullbin's United Scullerymaids' and Househelps' Sorority turned him down and assisted nature by unitedly kicking the source of annoyance out of the place altogether in the heat of the moment, holding one another's gonk (for no-one, hound or scrublady, dared whiff the polecat at close range) and making some pointing remarks as they done so aboon the lyow why a stunk.

One cannot even begin to figure out how slow in reality the Drumcondriac, called Hamish, really was. Who can say how many unsigned first copies of original masterworks, how many pseudostylic
{f39, 182}
shamiana, how few or how many of the most venerated public impostures, how very many piously forged palimpsests, slipped in the first place by this morbid process from his plagiarist pen?

Be that as it may, but for his gnose's glow as it slid within an inch of its page Nibs never would have quilled a seriph to sheepskin. By that rosy lampoon's effluvious burning and with help of the simulchronic flash in his pann he scribbled and scratched nameless shamelessness about everybody ever he met, even sharing a shower under the dogs' umbrella of a public wall, while all over and up and down the four margins of this rancid Shem stuff the evilsmeller (who was devoted to Sardanapalus) used to stipple endlessly inartistic portraits of himself as a heartbreakingly handsome young man with love lyrics for the goyls in his eyols, a plaintiff's tenor voarse, a ^|5ducal income jucal inkome^5| of one hundred and thirtytwo dranchmas per yard derived from stranded estate, Oxford ^|5manners mannings^5|, cutting a great dash in a brandnew two-guinea dress suit and a burled shirt hired for a Furskay evenin merry pawty, anna loavely long pair of inky Italian moostarshes glistering with boric vaseline and frangipani. Pah! How unwhisperably so!

The house ^|5of Shem or Shame O'Shea or O'Shame^5|, known as the Haunted Inkbottle, one Brimstone Walk, Asia in Ireland, as it was infested with the raps, with his penname SHUT ^|5sepiasoaped sepiascraped^5| on the doorplate and a blind of black sailcloth over its wan phwinshogue, in which he groped through life at the expense of the taxpayers, dejected into day and night with jesuist bark and bitter bite, by full and forty quisisanos, every day in everyone's way more exceeding in violent abuse of self and others, was the worst, it is hoped, even in our western playboyish world for pure mousefarm filth. ^|5|xSmatterafact,^{x| |a}Angels Angles^a| oftanonº browsing there thought not Edam reeked more rare. ^|athe unread Myº wud!^a|5| The warped flooring of the lair and soundconducting walls thereof ^|+5was were^+|5| persianly literatured with burst loveletters, telltale stories, stickyback snaps, doubtful eggshells, you owe mes, fluefoul smut, fallen lucifers, vestas which had served, showered ornaments, borrowed brogues, reversible jackets, blackeye lenses, family jars, falsehair shirts, Godforsaken scapulars,
{f10, 145}
neverworn breeches, cutthroat ties, counterfeit franks, best intentions, curried notes, upset latten tintacks, unused mill and stumbling stones, twisted quills, painful digests, magnifying wineglasses, solid objects cast at goblins, once current puns, quashed quotatoes, messes of mottage, unquestionable issue papers, seedy ejaculations, limerick damns, crocodile tears, spilt ink, blasphematory spits, stale chestnuts, schoolgirls', young ladies', milkmaids', washerwomen's, shopkeepers' wives', merry widows', ex nuns', vice abbesses', pro virgins', super whores', silent sisters', Charleys' aunts', grandmothers', mothers-in-laws', fostermothers', godmothers' garters, tress clippings from right and left, worms of snot, toothsome pickings, cans of Swiss condensed bilk, highbrow lotions, kisses from the antipodes, presents from pickpockets, borrowed plumes, relaxable handgrips, princess promises, lees of wine, deoxodised carbons, broken wafers, unloosed shoe latchets, convertible collars, crooked strait waistcoats, fresh horrors from Hades, globules of mercury, undeleted glete, glass eyes for an eye, false teeth for a tooth,
{f39, 184}
war moans, special sighs, longsufferings of longstanding, ahs ohs ouis sis jas jos gias neys thaws sos, yeses and yeses and yeses, to which, if one has the stomach to add the breakages, upheavals, distortions, inversions, of all this chambermade music, one stands, given a grain of goodwill, a fair chance of actually seeing the whirling dervish selfexiled in upon his ego, noondayterrorised to skin and bone by an ineluctable phantom, writing the mystery of himself in furniture.

Of course our low hero was a selfvaleter by choice of need so up he got up whatever is meant by a kitchenette and fowlhouse for the sake of eggs which the ^|5jokesmith jigsmith^5| brooled and cocked and potched in an athanor with cinnamon and locusts and wild beeswax and liquorice and Carageen moss and blaster of Barry's and Yellownan's embrocation and stardust and sinner's tears, chanting his cantraps, abracadabra calubra culorum (his oewfs à la Madame Gabrielle de l'Eglise, his oewfs à la Mistress B. de B. Meinfeldes, his oewfs à la Sulphate de
{f10, 146}
Soude, his oewfs sowtay sowmonay à la Monseigneur, his soufflosion à la Mère Puard, his Frideggs à la Tricarême), in what was meant for a closet. His costive Satan's
{f39, 185}
nature never needed such an alcove so, when Robber and Mumsell, the pulpic dictators, on the nudgment of their legal advisers, Messrs Codex and Podex, and under his own benefiction of their pastor Father Flammeus Falconer, boycotted him of all muttonsuet candles and romeruled stationery for any purpose, he winged away on a wildfool's chase across the kathartic ocean and made synthetic ink and sensitive paper for his own end out of his wits' waste. You ask, in Sam Hill, how? Let manner and matter of this for these our sporting times be cloaked up in the language of blushfed cardinals that an Anglican ordinal, not reading his own rude tongue, may ever behold the brand of scarlet on the brow of her of Babylon and feel not the pink one in his own damned cheek.

Primum opifex, altus prosator, ad terram viviparam et cunctipotentem sine ullo pudore nec venia, suscepto pluviali atque discinctis perizomatis, natibus nudis uti nati fuissent, sese adpropinquans, flens et gemens, in manum suam evacuavit (highly prosy, crap in his hand, sorry!), postea, animale nigro exoneratus, classicum pulsans, stercus proprium, quod appellavit deiectiones meas, in vas olim honorabile tristitiae posuit, eodem sub invocatione fratrorum geminorum Medardi et Godardi lente ac melliflue minxit, psalmum qui incipit: Lingua mea calamus scribae velociter scribentis: magna voce cantitans (did a piss, says he was dejected, asks to be exonerated), demum ex stercore turpi cum divi Orionis iucunditate mixto, cocto, frigorique exposito, encaustum sibi fecit indelibilem (faked O'Ryan's, the indelible ink).

With this double dye, gallic acid on iron ore, through the bowels of his misery, minutely, nastily, appropriately, the first and last alshemist wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation one
{f39, 186}
continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all manyvoiced moodmoulded cyclewheeling history (thereby, he said, reflecting from his own individual
{f10, 147}
person life unlivable, transaccidentated through the slow fires of consciousness into a dividual chaos, perilous, potent, common to all flesh, human only, mortal) but with each word that would not pass away the squidself which he had squirtscreened from the crystalline world waned chagreenold and doriangrayer in its ^|5outlook dulledhud^5|. So perhaps after all on his last public misappearance, on the deathday of Saint Ignaceous, circling the square and brandishing his bellbearing stylo, the shining keyman of the wilds of change, the blond cop who thought it was ink was out of his depth but bright in the main. Petty constable Sigurdsen it was, who had been detailed to save him from the effects of lynch law and mobmauling on looks, that ^|5greeted wrongcounteredº^5| the tenderfoot on his way from a ^|5prostitute protoprostitute^5| just as he was butting in round the corner of bad times with a hideful through his fongster, ^|5saying greetingº^5| as usual: Where ladies have they that a dog meansort herring? Search me, the incapable reparteed and^|5, raising his hair,^5| in he skittled. The allwhite poors guardiant was literally astounded over the sake and staggered thereto in his imaginations at the capacity of his wineskin and even more so during, upon looking his bigmost astonishments, it was said him fun the concerned human outgift of dirt med drink how that he was namely coon at bringher at home two gallons full poultry till his murder.
{f10, 148}
Polthergeistkotzdondherhoploits! What mother? Whose porter? Why namely coon? But enough of such porterblack lowness, too base for printink! We cannot stay here for the residence of our lives discussing Mr Ham of Tenman's thirst.

Stand forth, come boldly in your true colours (for no longer will I follow you through the inspired form of the third person singular but address myself to you direct), stand forth, jolly me, move me to laughter ere you be put back for ever till I give you your talkingto! Shem Macadamson, you know me and I know you and all your shemeries! Where have you been this hell of a time, my tooraladdy? How have you been enjoying yourself
{f39, 188}
all the morning since your last wetbed confession? I thought so! Let me see. It is looking pretty black against you, Sheem avick. You were bred, fed, fostered and fattened from holy childhood up in this two-easter island on the piejaw of hilarious heaven and roaring the other place and now, forsooth, a nogger among the blankards of this dastard century, you have become of twosome twiminds forenenst gods hidden and discovered, nay, condemned fool, anarch, egoarch, heresiarch, you have reared your disunited kingdom on the vacuum of your own most intensely doubtful soul. Do you hold yourself then for some god in the manger^|5, Shehohem,^5| that you will neither serve nor let serve, pray nor let pray? While yet an adolescent (what do I say?), while still puerile in your tubsuit with buttonlegs, you got a handsome present of a selfraising syringe and twin feeders (you know, my friend, to your cost as well as I do, and don't try to hide it, the penal laws I am now poking at) and the wheeze sort of was you should (if you were as bould a stroke now as the curate that christened you, sonny dout-the-candle!) repopulate the land of your birth and count up your progeny by the hundred head and the hundred thousand but you thwarted
{f39, 189}
the wious pish of your cogodparents, soph, on countless occasions of failing and have added the morosity of your delectations — a philtred love, trysting by tantrums, small peace in ppenmark — to Lubbock's other pleasures of life, even extruding your strabismal apologia, when legibly depressed, upon defenceless paper and thereby adding to the already unhappiness of this our popeyed world, scribblative! — all that too with cantreds of countless catchaleens, the many as many as the chosen, congested around and about you for acres and roods and poles or perches, mutely braying for what would not have cost you ten cents of collarwork or the price of one pang, just a lilt, let us sing, of the oldest song in the wide wide world (two-we! to-one!), accompanied by a plain gold band!

Sniffer of carrion, premature gravedigger, resurrecter of lazars, seeker of the nest of evil in the bosom of a good word, you, who sleep at our vigil and fast for our feast, you with your dislocated reason have cutely foretold, a jophet in your own absence, by blind poring upon your many scalds and burns and blisters, impetiginous sores and pustules, by the auspice of that raven cloud, your shade, and by the augury of rooks in parlament, death with every disaster, the dynamitisation of colleagues, the reducing of records to ashes, the levelling of all customs by blazes, the return of a lot
{f39, 190}
of sweettempered gunpowdered dust unto dust, but it never stphruck your mudhead's
{f10, 150}
obtundity that the more carrots you chop, the more turnips you slit, the more murphies you peel, the more onions you weep over, the more ^|5beef bullbeef^5| you butch, the more mutton you crackerhack, the more potherbs you pound, the fiercer the fire and the longer your spoon and the harder you gruel with more grease to your elbow the merrier smokes your new Irish stew.

Another thing ^|5occurs recursº^5| to me. You, let me tell you, were very ordinarily designed^|5, your birthwrong was,^5| to do a certain office (what, I will not tell you) in a certain holy office (nor will I say where) during certain agonising office hours from such a year to such an hour on such and such a date at so and so much a week pro anno and do your little thruppenny bit right here where you drew the first gasp in your lifesentence, same as we, long of us, where you set fire to my tailcoat and I'll held the paraffin lamp under yours (I hope that at least is clear) but, slackly shirking both your bullet and your billet, you beat it backwards like the baker from Galway ^|5(but he combed the grass against his stride)^5| to sing us a song of alibi, nomad, mooner by lamplight, antinos, shemming amid everyone's repressed laughter to conceal your coprophily by mating, like a thoroughpaste prosodite, masculine monosyllables of the same numerical mus, an Irish emigrant the wrong way out, sitting on your crooked
{f39, 191}
sixpenny stile, an unfrillfrocked quackfriar, you (will you for the love of Shakespeare just help me with the epithet?) semisemitic serendipitist, you (thanks, I think that describes you) Europasianised Afferyank!

There grew up beside you, oaf, outofwork, one remove from an unwashed savage, on his keeping and in yours, that
{f10, 151}
other, that pure one, he who was well known to heavenly circles before he sped aloft, a chum of the angels, a youth they so particularly wanted as gamefellow that they asked his mother for little clay brother to let him tome to Tindertarten, pease, and bing his scooter ^|5too 'long^5| and 'tend they were all real brothers in the big justright home where Dod lives, that mothersmothered model, that goodlooker with not a flaw whose spiritual toilettes were the talk of half the town, and him you laid low with one hand one fine May morning, your bosom foe, to find out how his innards worked! Ever hear of that monkey and the virgin heir of the Morrisons, eh, blethering ape?

Malingerer in luxury, what have you done with all the babyprams of cooked vegetables, the hatfuls of stewed fruit, the suitcases of coddled ales, the Parish funds, me schamer, man, that you kittycoaxed so flexibly out of charitable butteries by yowling heavy with a hollow voice drop of your horrible awful poverty of mind and as how you was bad no end, so you was, so whelp you, with the chicken's gape and pas mal de siècle which, by the by, is the ordinary emetic French for grenadier's drip. To let you have your plank and your bonewash (O, the sufferings of you!), to give you your pound of platinum and a thousand ^|5acres thongs^5| a year (O, you were excruciated, in honour bound to the cross of your ^|5own^5| fiction!), to let you have your Sarday spree and holinight sleep and leave to lie till Paraskivee (O, Jonathan, your estomach!). Weep cataracts for all me, Pain the Shamman! Oft in the smelly night will they wallow for a clutch of the vanished hand, I say,
{f10, 152}
them bearded jezebelles you hired to rob you, while on your sodden straw impolitely you encored (Airish and nawboggaleesh!) those hornmade ivory dreams you ^|5raved reved^5| of the flushpots of Euston and the hanging garments of Marylebone. But the dormer moonshee smiled selene and the lightthrowers knickered: who's whinging we? Where are the little apples we lock up in the little saltbox? Where is that little alimony nestegg against our predictable rainy day? Is it not the fact (gainsay me, cakeeater!) that
{f39, 193}
you squandered among underlings the overload of your extravagance and made a multitude of Hottentots crawsick with your crumbs? Am I not right? Don't tell me you are not a loanshark! Look up, old son, be advised by me and take your medicine! Just a little tonic, my gem of all jokes, to make you go green in the face. And remember that golden silence gives consent, Mr Anklegazer! Whisht! Come here till I tell you a wig in your ear. Look! Do you see your dial in the rockingglass, Herr Studiosus? Look well! Bend down a ^|5second stigmy^5| till I! It's secret! In your ear. Sh! Shem, you are. Sh! You are mad!

Pariah, cannibal Cain, you who oathily forswore the womb that bore you and the paps you sometime sucked, you who ever since have been one black mass of jigs and jimjams, haunted by a convulsionary sense
{f10, 153}
of not having been or being all that you might have been or meant to becoming,
{f39, 194}
bewailing like a man that innocence which you could not defend like a woman, lo, it is to you then, and thank Movies from the innermost depths of your still attrite heart for it is to you, firstborn and firstfruit of woe, to you, branded sheep, to you, pick of the wastepaperbasket, to you alone, windblasted tree of the knowledge of beautiful and evil, ay, to you, unseen blusher in an obscene coalhole, that your turfbrown mummy is acoming, running with her tidings, all the news of the great big world, with a beck, with a spring, all her rillringlets shaking, little oldfashioned mummy, little wonderful mummy, ducking under bridges, bellhopping the weirs, dodging by a bit of bog, rapidshooting round the bends, by Tallaght's green hills and the pool of the phooka and a place they call it Blessington and
{f39, 195}
slipping sly by Sallynoggin, as happy as the day is wet, babbling, bubbling, chattering to herself, deloothering the fields on their elbows leaning with the sloothering slide of her, giddygaddy grannyma, gossipaceous Anna Livia!