Page:Ulysses, 1922.djvu/440

Rh garters far above your station. Incautiously I took your part when you were accused of pilfering. There’s a medium in all things. Play cricket.

(Excitedly.) As God is looking down on me this night if ever I laid a hand to them oylsters!

The offence complained of? Did something happen?

He surprised me in the rere of the premises, your honour, when the missus was out shopping one morning with a request for a safety pin. He held me and I was discoloured in four places as a result. And he interfered twict with my clothing.

She counterassaulted.

(Scornfully.) I had more respect for the scouringbrush, so I had. I remonstrated with him, your lord, and he remarked: Keep it quiet!

(Clerk of the crown and peace, resonantly.) Order in court! The accused will now make a bogus statement.

(Bloom, pleading not guilty and holding a fullblown waterlily, begins a long unintelligible speech. They would hear what counsel had to say in his stirring address to the grandjury. He was down and out but, throughthough [sic] branded as a black sheep, if he might say so, he meant to reform, to retrieve the memory of the past in a purely sisterly way and return to nature as a purely domestic animal. A seven months child he had been carefully brought up and nurtured by an aged bedridden parent. There might have been lapses of an erring father but he wanted to turn over a new leaf and now, when at long last in sight of the whipping post, to lead a homely life in the evening of his days, permeated by the affectionate