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To which impromptu the neverfailing Bloom replied without a moment’s hesitation, saying straight off :

To sweep the floor in the morning.

So saying he skipped around nimbly, considering frankly, at the same time apologetic, to get on his companion’s right, a habit of his, by the bye the right side being, in classical idiom, his tender Achilles. The night air was certainly now a treat to breathe though Stephen was a bit weak on his pins.

It will (the air) do you good, Bloom said, meaning also the walk, in a moment. The only thing is to walk then you’ll feel a different man. It’s not far. Lean on me.

Accordingly he passed his left arm in Stephen’s right and led him on accordingly.

Yes, Stephen said uncertainly, because he thought he felt a strange kind of flesh of a different man approach him, sinewless and wobbly and all that.

Anyhow, they passed the sentrybox with stones, brazier, etc. where the municipal supernumerary, ex-Gumley, was still to all intents and purposes wrapped in the arms of Murphy, as the adage has it, dreaming of fresh fields and pastures new. And apropos of coffin of stones, the analogy was not at all bad, as it was in fact a stoning to death on the part of seventytwo out of eighty odd constituencies that ratted at the time of the split and chiefly the belauded peasant class, probably the selfsame evicted tenants he had put in their holdings.

So they passed on to chatting about music, a form of art for which Bloom, as a pure amateur, possessed the greatest love, as they made tracks arm-in-arm across Beresford Place. Wagnerian music, though confessedly grand in its way, was a bit too heavy for Bloom and hard to follow at the first go off but the music of Mercadante’s Huguenots, Meyerbeer’s Seven Last Words on the Cross, and Mozart’s Twelfth Mass, he simply revelled in, the Gloria in that being to his mind the acme of first class music as such, literally knocking everything else into a cocked hat. He infinitely preferred the sacred music of the catholic church to anything the opposite shop could offer in that line such as those Moody and Sankey hymns or Bid me to live and I will live thy protestant to be. He also yielded to none in his admiration of Rossini’s Stabat Mater, a work simply abounding in immortal numbers, in which his wife, Madam Marion Tweedy, made a hit, a veritable sensation, he might safely say greatly adding to her other laurels and putting the others totally in the