"Ah dearo dearo dear!"

(391.12-393.3)  Today's passage is the biggest downer of those that I've read to date in this chapter.  Gone is the "leaping laughing" that Marcus spoke of in yesterday's reading.  Lucas, continuing to talk about the four old men's time at the auction with Mrs. Dowager Justice Squalchman, remembers how "poor Mark or Marcus Bowandcoat" embarrassed himself by when "he forgot himself, making wind and water, and made a Neptune's mess of all of himself" (in other words, when he peed his pants) and when he "forgot to remember to sign an old morning proxy paper" that was to be delivered to the Mrs. Dowager Justice.

Worse off than Marcus was "poor Dion Cassius Poosycomb."  Dion is another man who drowned, like those we encountered earlier in the chapter.  He didn't drown literally, however.  His fatal mistake was having "eten a bad carmp in the rude ocean," or eaten bad crab in the Red Sea.  His terrible food poisoning left him "dead seasickabed . . . in the housepays for the daying at the Martyr Mrs MacCawley's."  There, Dion slipped away as he tried to hold his nurse's hand and remember what day he was born on.  Lucas can only exclaim, "Ah dearo dearo dear!"

"And where do you leave Matt Emeritus?" Lucas now asks.  It's not immediately clear whether this Matt -- "The laychief of Abbotabishop" -- is the Matt of the four old men, or whether the "Emeritus" signals that Lucas is thinking of a previous Matt (perhaps HCE).  This Matt was poorly dressed, and sat below groud in order to perform an expiatory rite.  His sin is unclear, but we learn that he was joined by a woman (perhaps his wife?) who gripped "an old pair of curling tongs" with which she was considering killing Matt.  "It was too bad entirely!" says Lucas after cataloging the scant food present for Matt and the woman.

Concluding his depressing address, Lucas finally exhorts his peers to participate in the Eucharist with him:  "and so now pass the loaf for Christ sake.  Amen.  And so.  And all."