(bloom, pleading not guilty and holding a fullblown waterlily, begins a long unintelligible speech. they would hear what counsel had to say in his stirring address to the grand-jury. he was down and out but, though branded as a black sheep, if he might say so, he meant to reform, to retrieve the memory of the past in a purely sisterly way and return to nature as a purely domestic animal. a seven months' child, he had been carefully brought up and nurtured by an aged bedridden parent. there might have been lapses of an erring father but he wanted to turn over a new leaf and now, when at long last in sight of the whipping post, to lead a homely life in the evening of his days, permeated by the affectionate surroundings of the heaving bosom of the family. an acclimatised britisher he had seen that summer eve from the footplate of an engine cab of the loop line railway company while the rain refrained from falling glimpses, as it were, through the windows of loveful households in dublin city and urban district of scenes truly rural of happiness of the better land with dockrell's wallpaper at one and ninepence a dozen, innocent british born bairns lisping prayers to the sacred infant, youthful scholars grappling with their pensums, model young ladies playing on the pianoforte or anon all with fervour reciting the family rosary round the crackling yulelog while in the boreens and green lanes the colleens with their swains strolled what times the strains of the organtoned melodeon britannia metalbound with four acting stops and twelvefold bellows, a sacrifice, greatest bargain ever... )(renewed laughter. he mumbles incoherently. reporters complain that they cannot hear.)longhand and shorthand (without looking up from their notebooks.) loosen his boots.
professor machugh (from the presstable, coughs and calls.) cough it up, man. get it out in bits.
(the crossexamination proceeds re bloom and the bucket. a lace bucket. bloom himself bowel trouble. in beaver street. gripe, yes. quite bad. a plasterers bucket. by walking stifflegged. suffered untold misery. deadly agony. about noon. love or burgundy. yes, some spinach. crucial moment. he did not look in the bucket. nobody. rather a mess. not completely. a titbits back number.)(uproar and catcalls. bloom, in a torn frockcoat stained with whitewash, dinged silk hat sideways on his head, a strip of sticking-plaster across his nose, talks inaudibly.)j. j. o'molloy (in barrister's grey wig and stuffgown, speaking with a voice of pained protest.) this is no place for indecent levity at the expense of an erring mortal disguised in liquor. we are not in a beargarden nor at an oxford rag nor is this a travesty of justice. my client is an infant, a poor foreign immigrant who started scratch as a stowaway and is now trying to turn an honest penny. the trumped up misdemeanour was due to a momentary aberration of heredity, brought on by hallucination, such familiarities as the alleged guilty occurrence being quite permitted in my client's native place, the land of the pharaoh. prima facie, i put it to you that there was no attempt at carnally knowing. intimacy did not occur and the offence complained of by driscoll, that her virtue was solicited, was not repeated. i would deal inespecial with atavism. there have been cases of shipwreck and somnambulism in my client's family. if the accused could speak he could a tale unfold one of the strangest that have ever been narrated between the covers of a book. he himself, my lord, is a physical wreck from cobbler's weak chest. his submission is that he is of mongolian extraction and irresponsible for his actions. not all there, in fact.