rose and begged the company to excuse his retreat as the nurse had just then informed him that he was needed in the ward.  Merciful providence had been pleased to put a period to the sufferings of the lady who was enceinte which she had borne with a laudable fortitude and she had given birth to a bouncing boy.  I want patience, said he, with those who, without wit to enliven or learning to instruct, revile an ennobling profession which, saving the reverence due to the Deity, is the greatest power for happiness upon the earth.  I am positive when I say that if need were I could produce a cloud of witnesses to the excellence of her noble exercitations which, so far from being a byword, should be a glorious incentive in the human breast.  I cannot away with them.  What?  Malign such an one, the amiable Miss Callan, who is the lustre of her own sex and the astonishment of ours?  And at an instant the most momentous that can befall a puny child of clay?  Perish the thought!  I shudder to think of the future of a race where the seeds of such malice have been sown and where no right reverence is rendered to mother and maid in house of Horne.  Having delivered himself of this rebuke he saluted those present on the by and repaired to the door.  A murmur of approval arose from all and some were for ejecting the low soaker without more ado, a design which would have been effected nor would he have received more than his bare deserts had he not abridged his transgression by affirming with a horrid imprecation (for he swore a round hand) that he was as good a son of the true fold as ever drew breath.  Stap my vitals, said he, them was always the sentiments of honest Frank Costello which I was bred up most particular to honour thy father and thy mother that had the best hand to a rolypoly or a hasty pudding as you ever see what I always looks back on with a loving heart.

To revert to Mr Bloom who, after his first entry, had been conscious of some impudent mocks which he however had borne with as being the fruits of that age upon which it is commonly charged that it knows not pity.  The young sparks, it is true, were as full of extravagancies as overgrown children:  the words of their tumultuary discussions were difficultly understood and not often nice:  their testiness and outrageous mots were such that his intellects resiled from:  nor were they scrupulously sensible of the proprieties though their fund of strong animal spirits spoke in their behalf.  But the word of Mr Costello was an unwelcome language for him for he nauseated the wretch that seemed to him a cropeared creature of a misshapen gibbosity, born out of wedlock and thrust like a crookback toothed and feet first into the world, which the dint of the surgeon’s pliers in his skull lent indeed a colour to, so as to put him in thought of that missing link of creation’s chain desiderated by the late ingenious Mr Darwin.  It was now for more than the middle span of our allotted