grove of lilacs at Roundtown, purple and white, fragrant slender spectators of the game but with much real interest in the pellets as they run slowly forward over the sward or collide and stop, one by its fellow, with a brief alert shock.  And yonder about that grey urn where the water moves at times in thoughtful irrigation you saw another as fragrant sisterhood, Floey, Atty, Tiny and their darker friend with I know not what of arresting in her pose then, Our Lady of the Cherries, a comely brace of them pendent from an ear, bringing out the foreign warmth of the skin so daintily against the cool ardent fruit.  A lad of four or five in linseywoolsey (blossomtime but there will be cheer in the kindly hearth when ere long the bowls are gathered and hutched) is standing on the urn secured by that circle of girlish fond hands.  He frowns a little just as this young man does now with a perhaps too conscious enjoyment of the danger but must needs glance at whiles towards where his mother watches from the PIAZZETTA giving upon the flowerclose with a faint shadow of remoteness or of reproach (Alles VERGANGLICHE) in her glad look.

Mark this farther and remember.  The end comes suddenly.  Enter that antechamber of birth where the studious are assembled and note their faces.  Nothing, as it seems, there of rash or violent.  Quietude of custody, rather, befitting their station in that house, the vigilant watch of shepherds and of angels about a crib in Bethlehem of Juda long ago.  But as before the lightning the serried stormclouds, heavy with preponderant excess of moisture, in swollen masses turgidly distended, compass earth and sky in one vast slumber, impending above parched field and drowsy oxen and blighted growth of shrub and verdure till in an instant a flash rives their centres and with the reverberation of the thunder the cloudburst pours its torrent, so and not otherwise was the transformation, violent and instantaneous, upon the utterance of the word.

Burke’s! outflings my lord Stephen, giving the cry, and a tag and bobtail of all them after, cockerel, jackanapes, welsher, pilldoctor, punctual Bloom at heels with a universal grabbing at headgear, ashplants, bilbos, Panama hats and scabbards, Zermatt alpenstocks and what not.  A dedale of lusty youth, noble every student there.  Nurse Callan taken aback in the hallway cannot stay them nor smiling surgeon coming downstairs with news of placentation ended, a full pound if a milligramme.  They hark him on.  The door!  It is open?  Ha!  They are out, tumultuously, off for a minute’s race, all bravely legging it, Burke’s of Denzille and Holles their ulterior goal.  Dixon follows giving them sharp language but raps out an oath, he too, and on.  Bloom stays with nurse a thought to send a kind word to happy mother and nurseling up there.  Doctor Diet and Doctor Quiet.  Looks she too not other now?  Ward of watching in Horne’s house has told its tale in that washedout pallor.  Then all being gone, a glance of motherwit helping, he whispers close in going:  Madam, when comes the storkbird for thee?