"every telling has a taling and that's the he and the she of it"

(212.20-214.10)  We're winding down to a close here in chapter eight of Finnegans Wake.  Just today's reading and tomorrow's, and then we're done with this extended look at ALP.  With the catalog of gifts given by ALP completed ("My colonial, wardha bagful!" one woman says), the washerwomen move back to their work.  "Throw us your hudson soap for the honour of Clane!" one says.  "The wee taste the water left.  I'll raft it back, first thing in the marne."  They continue bickering, and one notes that while the other gets all the swirls on her side of the river, her unfortunate friend just gets the snuff papers tossed into the water by Jonathan Swift (and, by proxy, HCE, for Swift -- who also had an ambiguous relationship with two young women -- is a version of HCE).  At least this woman gets to read the "[f]oul strips of his chinook's bible," which features amusing titles "drawn on the tattlepage" (among these titles are parodies of the works of Oscar Wilde, John S. Mill, and George Eliot).  One woman has spotted a piece of china below the river, but laments the fact that it seems to have disappeared.

The hour is now getting late.  In the dusk, the women are slowly turning into the tree and the stone that remained on the scene at the conclusion of the fable of the Mookse and the Gripes.  "My branches lofty are taking root," one woman says.  The woman are tired ("O, my back, my back, my bach!" one complains), and so they set to finishing their washing with the refrain, "Wring out the clothes!  Wring in the dew!"

They haven't finished discussing ALP, though.  One asks, "Wharnow are alle her childer, say?"  The other responds, "Some here, more no more, more again lost alla stranger."  We hear of the fates of a few.  One branch has married into a family in Spain, for example, while others are wearing "yangsee's hats" (meaning some have become Americans (yankees) and some have become Chinese (from the Yang-tze River)).  But as the night comes, the women have a harder time hearing each other.  "Do you tell me that now?" one asks.  Soon after, one says she's hard of hearing because of "that irrawaddyng I've stoke in my aars."

They've still got a little bit to discuss, however, as I mentioned, above.  We'll get to the chapter's finale tomorrow.