"Grinwicker time"

(516.3-518.14)  Shaun begins today's reading by detailing the arrival of HCE -- "MacSmashall Swingy of the Cattleaxes" -- on the town.  HCE walked around "dragging his feet in the usual course" and was "ever so terribly naas," offering grooming advice to the men he encountered.  His niceness had a limit, though.  He grew impatient waiting for "the key of John Dunn's field" as he wondered why someone named Montague was robbed and who burned some hay.  At this point, he encountered his nemesis, another form of the Cad, who we first encountered so long ago.  This new antagonist rises "up from the bog of the depths " and appears "raging with the thirst of the sacred sponge."

Was this how that "subtler angelic warfare or photoplay finister" began between the two eternal enemies, the old man asks.  "Truly," Shaun replies, "That I may never!"  One of the men was deaf and the other was dumb, and after they exchanged insults and blows they ended up "rolled togutter into the ditch together."  Echoing the Cad's request for the time when we first encountered him, the old man asks Shaun what time this all occurred (specifically in the "Greenwicker time" zone).  The two argue whether it was 11:30 or 12:30, but agree that the date was November 11:  "The uneven day of the unleventh month of the unevented year," as Shaun says, or "A triduum before Our Larry's own day," as the old man says (St. Lawrence O'Toole's feast day is November 14, as McHugh notes).

Shaun swears that he saw this fight from 100 feet away.  "Like the heavenly militia," says Shaun as he describes the skirmish.  "So wreek me Ghyllygully!  With my tongue through my toecap on the headlong stone of kismet if so 'tis the will of Whose B. Dunn."  The passage concludes with Shaun agreeing that the "arms' parley" seemed like "meatierities forces vegateareans."