as highly likely to carve his way to fame which he almost bid fair to do till the priests and ministers of the gospel as a whole, his erstwhile staunch adherents, and his beloved evicted tenants for whom he had done yeoman service in the rural parts of the country by taking up the cudgels on their behalf in a way that exceeded their most sanguine expectations, very effectually cooked his matrimonial goose, thereby heaping coals of fire on his head much in the same way as the fabled ass’s kick.  Looking back now in a retrospective kind of arrangement all seemed a kind of dream.  And then coming back was the worst thing you ever did because it went without saying you would feel out of place as things always moved with the times.  Why, as he reflected, Irishtown strand, a locality he had not been in for quite a number of years looked different somehow since, as it happened, he went to reside on the north side.  North or south, however, it was just the wellknown case of hot passion, pure and simple, upsetting the applecart with a vengeance and just bore out the very thing he was saying as she also was Spanish or half so, types that wouldn’t do things by halves, passionate abandon of the south, casting every shred of decency to the winds.

—­Just bears out what I was saying, he, with glowing bosom said to Stephen, about blood and the sun.  And, if I don’t greatly mistake she was Spanish too.

—­The king of Spain’s daughter, Stephen answered, adding something or other rather muddled about farewell and adieu to you Spanish onions and the first land called the Deadman and from Ramhead to Scilly was so and so many.

—­Was she?  Bloom ejaculated, surprised though not astonished by any means, I never heard that rumour before.  Possible, especially there, it was as she lived there.  So, Spain.

Carefully avoiding a book in his pocket sweets of, which reminded him by the by of that Cap l street library book out of date, he took out his pocketbook and, turning over the various contents it contained rapidly finally he.

—­Do you consider, by the by, he said, thoughtfully selecting a faded photo which he laid on the table, that a Spanish type?

Stephen, obviously addressed, looked down on the photo showing a large sized lady with her fleshy charms on evidence in an open fashion as she was in the full bloom of womanhood in evening dress cut ostentatiously low for the occasion to give a liberal display of bosom, with more than vision of breasts, her full lips parted and some perfect teeth, standing near, ostensibly with gravity, a piano on the rest of which was in old Madrid, a ballad, pretty in its way, which was then all the vogue.  Her (the lady’s) eyes, dark, large, looked at Stephen, about to smile about something to be admired, Lafayette of Westmoreland street, Dublin’s premier photographic artist, being responsible for the esthetic execution.

—­Mrs Bloom, my wife the prima donna Madam Marion Tweedy, Bloom indicated.  Taken a few years since.  In or about ninety six.  Very like her then.