(419.11-421.14) The crowd appreciates Shaun's telling of the story of the Ondt and Gracehoper. "How good you are in explosition!" they say. "How farflung is your fokkloire and how velktingeling your volupkabulary!" But what they really want is to hear Shaun read "the strangewrote anaglytics" of ALP's letter.
Shaun says that he's just the man to read the letter: "I am, thing Sing Larynx, letter potent to play the sem backwards." But Shaun has already read the letter himself, and he does not approve of its contents. "It is a pinch of scribble, not wortha bottle of cabbis," he says. "Overdrawn! Puffedly offal tosh! Besides its auctionable, all about crime and libel!" It tells the story of HCE and the pipe-smoking Cad ("a cat with a peep"), the two young women urinating in the park ("two madges on the makewater"), and the three soldiers who watched HCE watching the women ("treefellers in the shrubrubs").
As he goes on, Shaun doesn't actually read the letter aloud, but instead details his numerous unsuccessful attempts at delivering it. As McHugh and Tindall each note, many of these addresses are places where Joyce once lived, and others are locations significant in Joyce's life (such as "Finn's Hot," which stands for Finn's Hotel, where Joyce's wife Nora worked when the two met). Shaun encountered so many problems trying to deliver the letter, from "Nave unlodgeable" (name illegible) to "None so strait" (no such street) to "Wrongly spilled" (wrongly spelled) and "Closet for Repeers" (closed for repairs).
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