f which this vegetable world is but a
shadow. Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to
the past.

Mr Best came forward, amiable, towards his colleague.

--Haines is gone, he said.

--Is he?

--I was showing him Jubainville's book. He's quite enthusiastic, don't
you know, about Hyde's _Lovesongs of Connacht._ I couldn't bring him in
to hear the discussion. He's gone to Gill's to buy it.

_Bound thee forth, my booklet, quick
To greet the callous public.
Writ, I ween, 'twas not my wish
In lean unlovely English._

--The peatsmoke is going to his head, John Eglinton opined.

We feel in England. Penitent thief. Gone. I smoked his baccy. Green
twinkling stone. An emerald set in the ring of the sea.

--People do not know how dangerous lovesongs can be, the auric egg of
Russell warned occultly. The movements which work revolutions in the
world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the
hillside. For them the earth is not an exploitable ground but the
living mother. The rarefied air of the academy and the arena produce the
sixshilling novel, the musichall song. France produces the finest flower
of corruption in Mallarme but the desirable life is revealed only to the
poor of heart, the life of Homer's Phaeacians.

From these words Mr Best turned an unoffending face to Stephen.

--Mallarme, don't you know, he said, has written those wonderful prose
poems Stephen MacKenna used to read to me in Paris. The one about
_Hamlet._ He says: _il se promene, lisant au livre de lui-meme_, don't
you know, _reading the book of himself_. He describes _Hamlet_ given in
a French town, don't you know, a provincial town. They advertised it.

His free hand graciously wrote tiny signs in air.

_HAMLET
ou
LE DISTRAIT
Piece de Shakespeare_

He repeated to John Eglinton's newgathered frown:

--_Piece de Shakespeare_, don't you know. It's so French. The French
point of view. _Hamlet ou_...

--The absentminded beggar, Stephen ended.

John Eglinton laughed.

--Yes, I suppose it would be, he said. Excellent people, no doubt, but
distressingly shortsighted in some matters.

Sumptuous and stagnant exaggeration of murder.

--A deathsman of the soul Robert Greene called him, Stephen said. Not
for nothing was he a butcher's son, wielding the sledded poleaxe and
spitting in his palms. Nine lives are taken off for his father's one.
Our Father who art in