us, never-theless, the year the sugar was scarce, and we to lather and shave and frizzle him, like a bald surging buoy and himself down to three cows that was meat and drink and dogs and washing to him, ’tis good cause we have to remember it, going through summersultryngs of snow and sleet witht the widow Nolan’s goats and the Brownes girls neats anyhow, wait till I tell you, what did he do, poor old Roderick O’Conor Rex, the aus-picious waterproof monarch of all Ireland, when he found him— self all alone by himself in his grand old handwedown pile after all of them had all gone off with themselves to their castles of mud, as best they cud, on footback, owing to the leak of the McCarthy’s mare, in extended order, a tree’s length from the longest way out, down the switchbackward slidder of the land-sown route of Hauburnea’s liveliest vinnage on the brain, the unimportant Parthalonians with the mouldy Firbolgs and the Tuatha de Danaan googs and the ramblers from Clane and all the rest of the notmuchers that he did not care the royal spit out of his ostensible mouth about, well, what do you think he did, sir, but, faix, he just went heeltapping through the winespilth and weevily popcorks that were kneedeep round his own right royal round rollicking toper’s table, with his old Roderick Ran-dom pullon hat at a Lanty Leary cant on him and Mike Brady’s shirt and Greene’s linnet collarbow and his Ghenter’s gaunts and his Macclefield’s swash and his readymade Reillys and his pan-prestuberian poncho, the body you’d pity him, the way the world is, poor he, the heart of Midleinster and the supereminent lord of them all, overwhelmed as he was with black ruin like a sponge out of water, allocutioning in bellcantos to his own oliverian society MacGuiney’s Dreans of Ergen Adams and thruming through all to himself with diversed tonguesed through his old tears and his ould plaised drawl. starkened by the most regal of belches, like a blurney Cashelmagh crooner that lerking Clare air, the blackberd’s ballad I’ve a terrible errible lot todue todie todue tootorribleday, well, what did he go and do at all, His Most Exuberant Majesty King Roderick 0’Conor but, arrah bedamnbut, he finalised by lowering his woolly throat with the wonderful midnight thirst was on him, as keen as mustard, he could not tell what he did ale, that bothered he was from head to tail, and, wishawishawish, leave it, what the Irish, boys, can do, if he did’nt go, sliggymaglooral reemyround and suck up, sure enough, like a Trojan, file:///E|/Books/Top%20100%20Novels%20list/Finnegans%20Wake/complete.html[9/12/2007 12:21:58 PM]
Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce
in some particular cases with the assistance of his vene-rated tongue, whatever surplus rotgut, sorra much, was left by the lazy lousers of maltknights and beerchurls in the different bot-toms of the various different replenquished drinking utensils left there behind them on the premisses by that whole hogsheaded firkin family, the departed honourable homegoers and other sly-grogging suburbanites, such as it was, fall and fall about, to the brindishing of his charmed life, as toastified by his cheeriubi-cundenances, no matter whether it was chateaubottled Guiness’s or Phoenix brewery stout it was or John Jameson and Sons or Roob Coccola or, for the matter of that, O’Connell’s famous old Dublin ale that he wanted like hell, more that halibut oil or jesuits tea, as a fall back, of several different quantities and quali-ties amounting in all to, I should say, considerably more than the better part of a gill or naggin of imperial dry and liquid measure till, welcome be from us here, till the rising of the morn, till that hen of Kaven’s shows her beaconegg, and Chapwellswendows stain our horyhistoricold and Father MacMichael stamps for aitch o’clerk mess and the Litvian Newestlatter is seen, sold and delivered and all’s set for restart after the silence, like his ancestors to this day after him (that the blazings of their ouldmouldy gods may attend to them we pray!), overopposides