—­I’m the queerest young fellow that ever you heard. 
    My mother’s A jew, my father’s A bird. 
    With Joseph the joiner I cannot agree. 
    So here’s to disciples and Calvary.

He held up a forefinger of warning.

  —­If anyone thinks that I Amn’t divine
    he’ll get no free drinks when I’m making the wine
    but have to drink water and wish it were plain
    that I make when the wine becomes water again.

He tugged swiftly at Stephen’s ashplant in farewell and, running forward to a brow of the cliff, fluttered his hands at his sides like fins or wings of one about to rise in the air, and chanted: 

  —­Goodbye, now, goodbye!  Write down all I said
    and tell Tom, DIEK and Harry I rose from the dead. 
    What’s bred in the bone cannot fail me to fly
    and OLIVET’S breezy ...  Goodbye, now, goodbye!

He capered before them down towards the forty-foot hole, fluttering his winglike hands, leaping nimbly, Mercury’s hat quivering in the fresh wind that bore back to them his brief birdsweet cries.

Haines, who had been laughing guardedly, walked on beside Stephen and said: 

—­We oughtn’t to laugh, I suppose.  He’s rather blasphemous.  I’m not a believer myself, that is to say.  Still his gaiety takes the harm out of it somehow, doesn’t it?  What did he call it?  Joseph the Joiner?

—­The ballad of joking Jesus, Stephen answered.

—­O, Haines said, you have heard it before?

—­Three times a day, after meals, Stephen said drily.

—­You’re not a believer, are you?  Haines asked.  I mean, a believer in the narrow sense of the word.  Creation from nothing and miracles and a personal God.

—­There’s only one sense of the word, it seems to me, Stephen said.

Haines stopped to take out a smooth silver case in which twinkled a green stone.  He sprang it open with his thumb and offered it.

—­Thank you, Stephen said, taking a cigarette.

Haines helped himself and snapped the case to.  He put it back in his sidepocket and took from his waistcoatpocket a nickel tinderbox, sprang it open too, and, having lit his cigarette, held the flaming spunk towards Stephen in the shell of his hands.

—­Yes, of course, he said, as they went on again.  Either you believe or you don’t, isn’t it?  Personally I couldn’t stomach that idea of a personal God.  You don’t stand for that, I suppose?