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Accordingly he passed his left arm in Stephen’s right and
led him on accordingly.
—Yes, Stephen said uncertainly because he thought he
felt a strange kind of flesh of a different man approach him,
sinewless and wobbly and all that.
Anyhow they passed the sentrybox with stones, bra-
zier etc. where the municipal supernumerary, ex Gumley,
was still to all intents and purposes wrapped in the arms
of Murphy, as the adage has it, dreaming of fresh fields and
pastures new. And apropos of coffin of stones the analogy
was not at all bad as it was in fact a stoning to death on the
part of seventytwo out of eighty odd constituencies that rat-
ted at the time of the split and chiefly the belauded peasant
class, probably the selfsame evicted tenants he had put in
their holdings.
So they turned on to chatting about music, a form of art
for which Bloom, as a pure amateur, possessed the greatest
love, as they made tracks arm in arm across Beresford place.
Wagnerian music, though confessedly grand in its way, was
a bit too heavy for Bloom and hard to follow at the first go-
off but the music of Mercadante’s Huguenots, Meyerbeer’s
Seven Last Words on the Cross and Mozart’s Twelfth Mass
he simply revelled in, the Gloria in that being, to his mind,
the acme of first class music as such, literally knocking ev-
erything else into a cocked hat. He infinitely preferred the
sacred music of the catholic church to anything the oppo-
site shop could offer in that line such as those Moody and
Sankey hymns or Bid me to live and i will live thy protestant
to be. He also yielded to none in his admiration of Rossini’s