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Mr Best entered, tall, young, mild, light. He bore in his hand with grace a notebook, new, large, clean, bright.

Episode 9 - Scylla And Charybdis

URBANE, TO COMFORT THEM, THE QUAKER LIBRARIAN PURRED:
“-- And we have, have we not, those priceless pages of Wilhelm Meister? A great poet on a great brother poet. A hesitating soul taking arms against a sea of troubles, torn by conflicting doubts, as one sees in real life.”

Mr Bloom and Stephen, each in his own particular way, both instinctively exchanged meaning glances, in a religious silence of the strictly entre nous variety however, towards where Skin-the-Goat, alias the keeper, was drawing spurts of liquid from his boiler affair. His inscrutable face, which was really a work of art, . . . conveyed the impression that he didn't understand one jot of what was going on. Funny very.

-- Bottle Out there, say. Fifty yards measured. Eggs on the bottles. Cocks his gun over his shoulder. Aims.

[ . . . ]

-- Pom, he then shouted once.

The entire audience waited, anticipating an additional detonation, there being still a further egg.

-- Pom, he shouted twice.

Egg two evidently demolished, he nodded and winked, adding bloodthirstily:

Buffalo Bill shoots to kill,
Never misse nor he never will.

Accordingly his first act was with characteristic sangfroid to order these commodities quietly. The hoi polloi of jarvies or stevedores, or whatever they were, after a cursory examination, turned their eyes, apparently dissatisfied, away, though one redbearded bibulous individual, a portion of whose hair was greyish, a sailor, still stared for some appreciable time before transferring his rapt attention to the floor.

Stephen's mind's eye being too busily engaged in repicturing his family hearth the last time he saw it, with his sister, Dilly, sitting by the ingle, her hair hanging down, waiting for some weak Trinidad shell cocoa that was in the sootcoated kettle to be done so that she and he could drink it with the oatmeal water for milk after the Friday herrings they had eaten . . . with an egg apiece for Maggy, Boody and Katey

Mr Bloom in the meanwhile kept dodging about in the vicinity of the cobblestones near the brazier of coke in front of the corporation watchman's sentrybox, who, evidently a glutton for work, it struck him, was having a quiet forty winks for all intents and purposes on his own private account while Dublin slept. He threw an odd eye at the same time now and then at Stephen's anything but immaculately attired interlocut

He was out of a job and implored of Stephen to tell him where on God's earth he could get something, anything at all to do. No, it was the daughter of the mother in the washkitchen that was fostersister to the heir of the house or else they were connected through the mother in some way, both occurrences happening at the same time if the whole thing wasn't a complete fabrication from start to finish. Anyhow, he was

Preparatory To Anything else Mr Bloom brushed off the greater bulk of the shavings and handed Stephen the hat and ashplant and bucked him up generally in orthodox Samaritan fashion, which he very badly needed. His (Stephen’s) mind was not exactly what you would call wandering but a bit unsteady and on his expressed desire for some beverage to drink Mr Bloom,..hit upon an expedient by suggesting,..the cabman’s shelter

So we turned into Barney Kiernan’s and there sure enough was the citizen up in the corner having a great confab with himself and that bloody mangy mongrel, Garryowen, and he waiting for what the sky would drop in the way of drink.
—-There he is, says I, in his glory hold, with his cruiskeen lawn and his load of papers, working for the cause.