Ba.  What is that flying about?  Swallow?  Bat probably.  Thinks I’m a tree, so blind.  Have birds no smell?  Metempsychosis.  They believed you could be changed into a tree from grief.  Weeping willow.  Ba.  There he goes.  Funny little beggar.  Wonder where he lives.  Belfry up there.  Very likely.  Hanging by his heels in the odour of sanctity.  Bell scared him out, I suppose.  Mass seems to be over.  Could hear them all at it.  Pray for us.  And pray for us.  And pray for us.  Good idea the repetition.  Same thing with ads.  Buy from us.  And buy from us.  Yes, there’s the light in the priest’s house.  Their frugal meal.  Remember about the mistake in the valuation when I was in Thom’s.  Twentyeight it is.  Two houses they have.  Gabriel Conroy’s brother is curate.  Ba.  Again.  Wonder why they come out at night like mice.  They’re a mixed breed.  Birds are like hopping mice.  What frightens them, light or noise?  Better sit still.  All instinct like the bird in drouth got water out of the end of a jar by throwing in pebbles.  Like a little man in a cloak he is with tiny hands.  Weeny bones.  Almost see them shimmering, kind of a bluey white.  Colours depend on the light you see.  Stare the sun for example like the eagle then look at a shoe see a blotch blob yellowish.  Wants to stamp his trademark on everything.  Instance, that cat this morning on the staircase.  Colour of brown turf.  Say you never see them with three colours.  Not true.  That half tabbywhite tortoiseshell in the city arms with the letter em on her forehead.  Body fifty different colours.  Howth a while ago amethyst.  Glass flashing.  That’s how that wise man what’s his name with the burning glass.  Then the heather goes on fire.  It can’t be tourists’ matches.  What?  Perhaps the sticks dry rub together in the wind and light.  Or broken bottles in the furze act as a burning glass in the sun.  Archimedes.  I have it!  My memory’s not so bad.

Ba.  Who knows what they’re always flying for.  Insects?  That bee last week got into the room playing with his shadow on the ceiling.  Might be the one bit me, come back to see.  Birds too.  Never find out.  Or what they say.  Like our small talk.  And says she and says he.  Nerve they have to fly over the ocean and back.  Lots must be killed in storms, telegraph wires.  Dreadful life sailors have too.  Big brutes of oceangoing steamers floundering along in the dark, lowing out like seacows.  Faugh A Ballagh!  Out of that, bloody curse to you!  Others in vessels, bit of a handkerchief sail, pitched about like snuff at a wake when the stormy winds do blow.  Married too.  Sometimes away for years at the ends of the earth somewhere.  No ends really because it’s round.  Wife in every port they say.  She has a good job if she minds it till Johnny comes marching home again.  If ever he does.  Smelling the tail end of ports.  How can they like the sea?  Yet they do.  The anchor’s weighed.  Off he sails with a scapular or a medal on him for