the dark stained
wood. The sudden legend startled his blood: he seemed to feel the
absent students of the college about him and to shrink from their
company. A vision of their life, which his father's words had been
powerless to evoke, sprang up before him out of the word cut in the
desk. A broad-shouldered student with a moustache was cutting in the
letters with a jack-knife, seriously. Other students stood or sat near
him laughing at his handiwork. One jogged his elbow. The big student
turned on him, frowning. He was dressed in loose grey clothes and had
tan boots.

Stephen's name was called. He hurried down the steps of the theatre so
as to be as far away from the vision as he could be and, peering
closely at his father's initials, hid his flushed face.

But the word and the vision capered before his eyes as he walked back
across the quadrangle and towards the college gate. It shocked him to
find in the outer world a trace of what he had deemed till then a
brutish and individual malady of his own mind. His monstrous reveries
came thronging into his memory. They too had sprung up before him,
suddenly and furiously, out of mere words. He had soon given in to them
and allowed them to sweep across and abase his intellect, wondering
always where they came from, from what den of monstrous images, and
always weak and humble towards others, restless and sickened of himself
when they had swept over him.

--Ay, bedad! And there's the Groceries sure enough! cried Mr Dedalus.
You often heard me speak of the Groceries, didn't you, Stephen. Many's
the time we went down there when our names had been marked, a crowd of
us, Harry Peard and little Jack Mountain and Bob Dyas and Maurice
Moriarty, the Frenchman, and Tom O'Grady and Mick Lacy that I told you
of this morning and Joey Corbet and poor little good-hearted Johnny
Keevers of the Tantiles.

The leaves of the trees along the Mardyke were astir and whispering in
the sunlight. A team of cricketers passed, agile young men in flannels
and blazers, one of them carrying the long green wicket-bag. In a quiet
bystreet a German band of five players in faded uniforms and with
battered brass instruments was playing to an audience of street arabs
and leisurely messenger boys. A maid in a white cap and apron was
watering a box of plants on a sill which shone like a slab of limestone
in the warm glare. From another window open to the air came the sound
of a piano, scale after scale risin