The memory of his childhood suddenly grew dim.  He tried to call forth some of its vivid moments but could not.  He recalled only names.  Dante, Parnell, Clane, Clongowes.  A little boy had been taught geography by an old woman who kept two brushes in her wardrobe.  Then he had been sent away from home to a college, he had made his first communion and eaten slim jim out of his cricket cap and watched the firelight leaping and dancing on the wall of a little bedroom in the infirmary and dreamed of being dead, of mass being said for him by the rector in a black and gold cope, of being buried then in the little graveyard of the community off the main avenue of limes.  But he had not died then.  Parnell had died.  There had been no mass for the dead in the chapel and no procession.  He had not died but he had faded out like a film in the sun.  He had been lost or had wandered out of existence for he no longer existed.  How strange to think of him passing out of existence in such a way, not by death but by fading out in the sun or by being lost and forgotten somewhere in the universe!  It was strange to see his small body appear again for a moment:  a little boy in a grey belted suit.  His hands were in his side-pockets and his trousers were tucked in at the knees by elastic bands.

On the evening of the day on which the property was sold Stephen followed his father meekly about the city from bar to bar.  To the sellers in the market, to the barmen and barmaids, to the beggars who importuned him for a lob Mr Dedalus told the same tale—­that he was an old Corkonian, that he had been trying for thirty years to get rid of his Cork accent up in Dublin and that Peter Pickackafax beside him was his eldest son but that he was only a Dublin jackeen.

They had set out early in the morning from Newcombe’s coffee-house, where Mr Dedalus’s cup had rattled noisily against its saucer, and Stephen had tried to cover that shameful sign of his father’s drinking bout of the night before by moving his chair and coughing.  One humiliation had succeeded another—­the false smiles of the market sellers, the curvetings and oglings of the barmaids with whom his father flirted, the compliments and encouraging words of his father’s friends.  They had told him that he had a great look of his grandfather and Mr Dedalus had agreed that he was an ugly likeness.  They had unearthed traces of a Cork accent in his speech and made him admit that the Lee was a much finer river than the Liffey.  One of them, in order to put his Latin to the proof, had made him translate short passages from Dilectus and asked him whether it was correct to say:  TEMPORA MUTANTUR NOS et MUTAMUR in ILLIS or TEMPORA MUTANTUR et NOS MUTAMUR in ILLIS.  Another, a brisk old man, whom Mr Dedalus called Johnny Cashman, had covered him with confusion by asking him to say which were prettier, the Dublin girls or the Cork girls.

—­He’s not that way built, said Mr Dedalus.  Leave him alone.  He’s a level-headed thinking boy who doesn’t bother his head about that kind of nonsense.