Page 1044 - ULYSSES
P. 1044
Ulysses
After which effusion the redoubtable specimen duly
arrived on the scene and regaining his seat he sank rather
than sat heavily on the form provided. Skin-the-Goat,
assuming he was he, evidently with an axe to grind, was
airing his grievances in a forcible-feeble philippic anent the
natural resources of Ireland or something of that sort
which he described in his lengthy dissertation as the richest
country bar none on the face of God’s earth, far and away
superior to England, with coal in large quantities, six
million pounds worth of pork exported every year, ten
millions between butter and eggs and all the riches drained
out of it by England levying taxes on the poor people that
paid through the nose always and gobbling up the best
meat in the market and a lot more surplus steam in the
same vein. Their conversation accordingly became general
and all agreed that that was a fact. You could grow any
mortal thing in Irish soil, he stated, and there was that
colonel Everard down there in Navan growing tobacco.
Where would you find anywhere the like of Irish bacon?
But a day of reckoning, he stated crescendo with no
uncertain voice, thoroughly monopolising all the
conversation, was in store for mighty England, despite her
power of pelf on account of her crimes. There would be a
fall and the greatest fall in history. The Germans and the
1043 of 1305