Page 565 - ULYSSES
P. 565
Ulysses
not now restrain his natural emotion. With his mailed
gauntlet he brushed away a furtive tear and was overheard,
by those privileged burghers who happened to be in his
immediate entourage, to murmur to himself in a faltering
undertone:
—God blimey if she aint a clinker, that there bleeding
tart. Blimey it makes me kind of bleeding cry, straight, it
does, when I sees her cause I thinks of my old mashtub
what’s waiting for me down Limehouse way.
So then the citizen begins talking about the Irish
language and the corporation meeting and all to that and
the shoneens that can’t speak their own language and Joe
chipping in because he stuck someone for a quid and
Bloom putting in his old goo with his twopenny stump
that he cadged off of Joe and talking about the Gaelic
league and the antitreating league and drink, the curse of
Ireland. Antitreating is about the size of it. Gob, he’d let
you pour all manner of drink down his throat till the Lord
would call him before you’d ever see the froth of his pint.
And one night I went in with a fellow into one of their
musical evenings, song and dance about she could get up
on a truss of hay she could my Maureen Lay and there was
a fellow with a Ballyhooly blue ribbon badge spiffing out
of him in Irish and a lot of colleen bawns going about
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