he said:

--I say!

--What? asked Stephen.

--You know, he said, you can ask that riddle another way.

--Can you? said Stephen.

--The same riddle, he said. Do you know the other way to ask it?

--No, said Stephen.

--Can you not think of the other way? he said.

He looked at Stephen over the bedclothes as he spoke. Then he lay back
on the pillow and said:

--There is another way but I won't tell you what it is.

Why did he not tell it? His father, who kept the racehorses, must be a
magistrate too like Saurin's father and Nasty Roche's father. He
thought of his own father, of how he sang songs while his mother played
and of how he always gave him a shilling when he asked for sixpence and
he felt sorry for him that he was not a magistrate like the other boys'
fathers. Then why was he sent to that place with them? But
his father had told him that he would be no stranger there because his
granduncle had presented an address to the liberator there fifty years
before. You could know the people of that time by their old dress. It
seemed to him a solemn time: and he wondered if that was the time when
the fellows in Clongowes wore blue coats with brass buttons and yellow
waistcoats and caps of rabbitskin and drank beer like grown-up people
and kept greyhounds of their own to course the hares with.

He looked at the window and saw that the daylight had grown weaker.
There would be cloudy grey light over the playgrounds. There was no
noise on the playgrounds. The class must be doing the themes or perhaps
Father Arnall was reading out of the book.

It was queer that they had not given him any medicine. Perhaps Brother
Michael would bring it back when he came. They said you got stinking
stuff to drink when you were in the infirmary. But he felt better now
than before. It would be nice getting better slowly. You could get a
book then. There was a book in the library about Holland. There were
lovely foreign names in it and pictures of strange looking cities and
ships. It made you feel so happy.

How pale the light was at the window! But that was nice. The fire rose
and fell on the wall. It was like waves. Someone had put coal on and he
heard voices. They were talking. It was the noise of the waves. Or the
waves were talking among themselves as they rose and fell.

He saw the sea of waves, long dark waves rising and falling, dark under
the moonless night. A tiny light twinkled at the pierhead where the
ship was enter