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sense? would we now for annas and annas? would we for full-
score eight and a liretta? for twelve blocks one bob? for four tes-
ters one groat? not for a dinar! not for jo!) dictited to of all his
little brothron and sweestureens the first riddle of the universe:
asking, when is a man not a man?: telling them take their time,
yungfries, and wait till the tide stops (for from the first his day
was a fortnight) and offering the prize of a bittersweet crab, a
little present from the past, for their copper age was yet un-
minted, to the winner. One said when the heavens are quakers,
a second said when Bohemeand lips, a third said when he, no,
when hold hard a jiffy, when he is a gnawstick and detarmined
to, the next one said when the angel of death kicks the bucket
of life, still another said when the wine's at witsends, and still
another when lovely wooman stoops to conk him, one of the
littliest said me, me, Sem, when pappa papared the harbour, one
of the wittiest said, when he yeat ye abblokooken and he zmear
hezelf zo zhooken, still one said when you are old I'm grey fall
full wi sleep, and still another when wee deader walkner, and
another when he is just only after having being semisized, an-
other when yea, he hath no mananas, and one when dose pigs
they begin now that they will flies up intil the looft. All were
wrong, so Shem himself, the doctator, took the cake, the correct
solution being —— all give it up? —— when he is a —— yours till
the rending of the rocks, —— Sham.
    Shem was a sham and a low sham and his lowness creeped out
first via foodstuffs. So low was he that he preferred Gibsen's tea-
time salmon tinned, as inexpensive as pleasing, to the plumpest
roeheavy lax or the friskiest parr or smolt troutlet that ever was
gaffed between Leixlip and Island Bridge and many was the time
he repeated in his botulism that no junglegrown pineapple ever
smacked like the whoppers you shook out of Ananias' cans,
Findlater and Gladstone's, Corner House, Englend. None of
your inchthick blueblooded Balaclava fried-at-belief-stakes or
juicejelly legs of the Grex's molten mutton or greasilygristly
grunters' goupons or slice upon slab of luscious goosebosom
with lump after load of plumpudding stuffing all aswim in a