OLL: _(Excitedly)_ As God is looking down on me this night if
ever I laid a hand to them oysters!

FIRST WATCH: The offence complained of? Did something happen?

MARY DRISCOLL: He surprised me in the rere of the premises, Your honour,
when the missus was out shopping one morning with a request for a safety
pin. He held me and I was discoloured in four places as a result. And he
interfered twict with my clothing.

BLOOM: She counterassaulted.

MARY DRISCOLL: _(Scornfully)_ I had more respect for the scouringbrush,
so I had. I remonstrated with him, Your lord, and he remarked: keep it
quiet.

_(General laughter.)_

GEORGE FOTTRELL: _(Clerk of the crown and peace, resonantly)_ Order in
court! The accused will now make a bogus statement.

_(Bloom, pleading not guilty and holding a fullblown waterlily, begins
a long unintelligible speech. They would hear what counsel had to say in
his stirring address to the grand jury. He was down and out but, though
branded as a black sheep, if he might say so, he meant to reform, to
retrieve the memory of the past in a purely sisterly way and return to
nature as a purely domestic animal. A sevenmonths' child, he had been
carefully brought up and nurtured by an aged bedridden parent. There
might have been lapses of an erring father but he wanted to turn over
a new leaf and now, when at long last in sight of the whipping post,
to lead a homely life in the evening of his days, permeated by the
affectionate surroundings of the heaving bosom of the family. An
acclimatised Britisher, he had seen that summer eve from the footplate
of an engine cab of the Loop line railway company while the rain
refrained from falling glimpses, as it were, through the windows of
loveful households in Dublin city and urban district of scenes truly
rural of happiness of the better land with Dockrell's wallpaper at one
and ninepence a dozen, innocent Britishborn bairns lisping prayers to
the Sacred Infant, youthful scholars grappling with their pensums or
model young ladies playing on the pianoforte or anon all with fervour
reciting the family rosary round the crackling Yulelog while in the
boreens and green lanes the colleens with their swains strolled what
times the strains of the organtoned melodeon Britannia metalbound with
four acting stops and twelvefold bellows, a sacrifice, greatest bargain
ever..._

_(Renewed laughter. He mumbles incoherently. Reporters complain that
they cannot hear.)_

LONGHAN