Page 758 - ULYSSES

Ulysses

mystery was unveiled. Haines was the third brother. His
real name was Childs. The black panther was himself the
ghost of his own father. He drank drugs to obliterate. For
this relief much thanks. The lonely house by the graveyard

is uninhabited. No soul will live there. The spider pitches
her web in the solitude. The nocturnal rat peers from his
hole. A curse is on it. It is haunted. Murderer’s ground.
What is the age of the soul of man? As she hath the
virtue of the chameleon to change her hue at every new
approach, to be gay with the merry and mournful with the
downcast, so too is her age changeable as her mood. No
longer is Leopold, as he sits there, ruminating, chewing
the cud of reminiscence, that staid agent of publicity and
holder of a modest substance in the funds. A score of years
are blown away. He is young Leopold. There, as in a
retrospective arrangement, a mirror within a mirror (hey,
presto!), he beholdeth himself. That young figure of then
is seen, precociously manly, walking on a nipping morning
from the old house in Clanbrassil street to the high school,
his booksatchel on him bandolierwise, and in it a goodly
hunk of wheaten loaf, a mother’s thought. Or it is the
same figure, a year or so gone over, in his first hard hat
(ah, that was a day!), already on the road, a fullfledged
traveller for the family firm, equipped with an orderbook,

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