"How are them columbuses!"

(409.8-411.21)  With Shaun's opening remarks concluded, the narrator begins to recount in today's passage a dialogue between Shaun and the assembled crowd.  The crowd first asks Shaun who gave him the permit to take up the occupation of postman.  His reply is evasive.  He's fatigued, and his life is one of burden:  "My heaviest crux and dairy lot it is, with a bed as hard as the thinkamuddles of the Greeks and a board as bare as a Roman altar."  He says that he spent some time a few fortnights ago with a pair of men from "the Headfire Clump" who taught him about workers' rights, and he adds that he has heard prophecies of future "sabotag" (either the Saturday at the end of the week, in which the workers can rest, or general sabotage).

With their question pretty much left unanswered, the crowd pursues it from a slightly different angle, asking whether Shaun had been ordered to be a postman.  He answers that he did not want to work, but "it was condemned on me premitially by Hireark Books and Chiefoverseer Cooks in their Eusebian Concordant Homilies."  The job, he continues, "is put upon me from on high out of the book of breedings."  His "hairydittary" job feels to him like a "bad attack of maggot."  He's fed up of wandering "like them nameless souls, ercked and skorned and grizzild all over," and he dreams of sneaking away to find himself, or, as he says, "to isolate i from my multiple Mes."

The crowd understands his feelings, but has hopes that Shaun might be the one "who will bear these open letter."  Shaun responds that he has the "gumpower" to do that.

In today's last question, the crowd asks where he's able to work.  "Here!" Shaun curtly replies before elaborating.  He's "too soft for work proper," so he walks "sixty odd eilish mires a week" along his route, as is his "vacation in life."  He must do his job, for if he engages in "unnecessary servile work of reckless walking of all sorts" he would "get into a blame there where sieves fall out" (and he wouldn't want to fall like his father, HCE).  All in all, he says, "I am awful good, I believe, so I am, at the root of me, praised be right cheek Discipline!"  He brings home groceries for his family, and he is a devout believer.