The dog’s bark ran towards him, stopped, ran back.  Dog of my enemy.  I just simply stood pale, silent, bayed about.  TERRIBILIA MEDITANS.  A primrose doublet, fortune’s knave, smiled on my fear.  For that are you pining, the bark of their applause?  Pretenders:  live their lives.  The Bruce’s brother, Thomas Fitzgerald, silken knight, Perkin Warbeck, York’s false scion, in breeches of silk of whiterose ivory, wonder of a day, and Lambert Simnel, with a tail of nans and sutlers, a scullion crowned.  All kings’ sons.  Paradise of pretenders then and now.  He saved men from drowning and you shake at a cur’s yelping.  But the courtiers who mocked Guido in Or san Michele were in their own house.  House of ...  We don’t want any of your medieval abstrusiosities.  Would you do what he did?  A boat would be near, a lifebuoy.  NATURLICH, put there for you.  Would you or would you not?  The man that was drowned nine days ago off Maiden’s rock.  They are waiting for him now.  The truth, spit it out.  I would want to.  I would try.  I am not a strong swimmer.  Water cold soft.  When I put my face into it in the basin at Clongowes.  Can’t see!  Who’s behind me?  Out quickly, quickly!  Do you see the tide flowing quickly in on all sides, sheeting the lows of sand quickly, shellcocoacoloured?  If I had land under my feet.  I want his life still to be his, mine to be mine.  A drowning man.  His human eyes scream to me out of horror of his death.  I ...  With him together down ...  I could not save her.  Waters:  bitter death:  lost.

A woman and a man.  I see her skirties.  Pinned up, I bet.

Their dog ambled about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on all sides.  Looking for something lost in a past life.  Suddenly he made off like a bounding hare, ears flung back, chasing the shadow of a lowskimming gull.  The man’s shrieked whistle struck his limp ears.  He turned, bounded back, came nearer, trotted on twinkling shanks.  On a field tenney a buck, trippant, proper, unattired.  At the lacefringe of the tide he halted with stiff forehoofs, seawardpointed ears.  His snout lifted barked at the wavenoise, herds of seamorse.  They serpented towards his feet, curling, unfurling many crests, every ninth, breaking, plashing, from far, from farther out, waves and waves.

Cocklepickers.  They waded a little way in the water and, stooping, soused their bags and, lifting them again, waded out.  The dog yelped running to them, reared up and pawed them, dropping on all fours, again reared up at them with mute bearish fawning.  Unheeded he kept by them as they came towards the drier sand, a rag of wolf’s tongue redpanting from his jaws.  His speckled body ambled ahead of them and then loped off at a calf’s gallop.  The carcass lay on his path.  He stopped, sniffed, stalked round it, brother, nosing closer, went round it, sniffling rapidly like a dog all over the dead dog’s bedraggled fell.  Dogskull, dogsniff, eyes on the ground, moves to one great goal.  Ah, poor dogsbody!  Here lies poor dogsbody’s body.