n in a cut bob (which are
now in with dance cloaks of Kendal green) that was new got to town from
Mullingar with the stage where his coz and Mal M's brother will stay a
month yet till Saint Swithin and asks what in the earth he does there,
he bound home and he to Andrew Horne's being stayed for to crush a cup
of wine, so he said, but would tell him of a skittish heifer, big of
her age and beef to the heel, and all this while poured with rain and
so both together on to Horne's. There Leop. Bloom of Crawford's journal
sitting snug with a covey of wags, likely brangling fellows, Dixon jun.,
scholar of my lady of Mercy's, Vin. Lynch, a Scots fellow, Will. Madden,
T. Lenehan, very sad about a racer he fancied and Stephen D. Leop. Bloom
there for a languor he had but was now better, be having dreamed tonight
a strange fancy of his dame Mrs Moll with red slippers on in a pair of
Turkey trunks which is thought by those in ken to be for a change and
Mistress Purefoy there, that got in through pleading her belly, and now
on the stools, poor body, two days past her term, the midwives sore put
to it and can't deliver, she queasy for a bowl of riceslop that is a
shrewd drier up of the insides and her breath very heavy more than good
and should be a bullyboy from the knocks, they say, but God give her
soon issue. 'Tis her ninth chick to live, I hear, and Lady day bit off
her last chick's nails that was then a twelvemonth and with other three
all breastfed that died written out in a fair hand in the king's bible.
Her hub fifty odd and a methodist but takes the sacrament and is to
be seen any fair sabbath with a pair of his boys off Bullock harbour
dapping on the sound with a heavybraked reel or in a punt he has
trailing for flounder and pollock and catches a fine bag, I hear. In sum
an infinite great fall of rain and all refreshed and will much increase
the harvest yet those in ken say after wind and water fire shall come
for a prognostication of Malachi's almanac (and I hear that Mr Russell
has done a prophetical charm of the same gist out of the Hindustanish
for his farmer's gazette) to have three things in all but this a mere
fetch without bottom of reason for old crones and bairns yet sometimes
they are found in the right guess with their queerities no telling how.

With this came up Lenehan to the feet of the table to say how the letter
was in that night's gazette and he made a show to find it about him
(for he swore with an oath