"As you spring so shall you neap."

(196.1-198.2)  Chapter eight of Finnegans Wake does indeed pick up where chapter seven left off:  ALP.  Its opening lines, formatted in the shape of a triangle (ALP's symbol) tell us all we need to know about the chapter's content:

O 

tell me all about 

Anna Livia!  I want to hear all

The chapter starts out as two women having a conversation as they wash HCE's clothes from opposing banks of the river.  (They must be at a narrow part of the river, for their heads bump when they stoop across the river to cross.  One woman says, "And don't butt me -- hike! -- when you bend.")  Naturally, their conversation meanders back and forth between ALP and her husband.  Also prominently featured in their dialogue are a torrent of river names, both famous and obscure, that keep the river theme prominent in the reader's mind.

The chapter begins with the recounting of and adding to the rumors surrounding HCE.  They begin by referring to the nefarious conduct that the three soldiers reported HCE engaged in with respect to the two young women in Phoenix Park:  "whatever it was they threed to make out he thried to two in the Fiendish park."  With this in mind, it's clear that HCE's reputation is as foul as his clothes.  "He's an awful old reppe," one says.  "Look at the shirt of him!  Look at the dirt of it!  He has all my water black on me."

Talk soon turns to the marriage between HCE and ALP.  Much like Joyce's own marriage, rumors abound about the legitimacy of their vows:  "Was her banns never loosened in Adam and Eve's or were him and her but captain spliced?"  In other words, did they receive a proper Catholic wedding (in Adam and Eve's, the church referenced on the book's first page), or were married in a civil service?  Regardless, it appears that HCE (represented by the hill of Howth) and ALP (represented by the flowing river Liffey) consider their marriage valid (as did Joyce in regard to his own marriage):  "Flowey and Mount on the brink of time makes wishes and fears for a happy isthmass.  She can show all her lines, with love, license to play.  And if they don't remarry that hook and eye may!"

The talk also touches on HCE's status as immigrant/invader.  It's unclear whether he gained material wealth from ALP after he "raped her home" or whether he's broke, with "[n]ot a grasshoop to ring her, not an antsgrain of ore."  Thus, even though one woman says, "I know by heart the places he likes to saale, duddurty devil!" and "I know he well," it seems at this early point in the chapter that neither woman has the full and accurate story of HCE and ALP.  Nevertheless, as that same woman says, "But toms will till."