Landlord never dies they say. Other steps into his shoes when he gets
his notice to quit. They buy the place up with gold and still they
have all the gold. Swindle in it somewhere. Piled up in cities, worn
away age after age. Pyramids in sand. Built on bread and onions.
Slaves Chinese wall. Babylon. Big stones left. Round towers. Rest rubble,
sprawling suburbs, jerrybuilt. Kerwan's mushroom houses built of breeze.
Shelter, for the night.

No-one is anything.

This is the very worst hour of the day. Vitality. Dull, gloomy: hate
this hour. Feel as if I had been eaten and spewed.

Provost's house. The reverend Dr Salmon: tinned salmon. Well
tinned in there. Like a mortuary chapel. Wouldn't live in it if they paid
me. Hope they have liver and bacon today. Nature abhors a vacuum.

The sun freed itself slowly and lit glints of light among the silverware
opposite in Walter Sexton's window by which John Howard Parnell passed,
unseeing.

There he is: the brother. Image of him. Haunting face. Now that's a
coincidence. Course hundreds of times you think of a person and don't
meet him. Like a man walking in his sleep. No-one knows him. Must be a
corporation meeting today. They say he never put on the city marshal's
uniform since he got the job. Charley Kavanagh used to come out on his
high horse, cocked hat, puffed, powdered and shaved. Look at the
woebegone walk of him. Eaten a bad egg. Poached eyes on ghost. I have a
pain. Great man's brother: his brother's brother. He'd look nice on the
city charger. Drop into the D.B.C. probably for his coffee, play chess