"Let sleepth."

(555.1-557.12)  The fourth and final chapter of Book III of Finnegans Wake begins with a sense of drowsy confusion.  "What was thaas?" a voice asks.  "Fog was whaas?  Too mult sleepth.  Let sleepth."  This is a bit of a misleading introduction to a chapter that looks to be fairly straightforward and poetic (at least two pages in).

It almost instantly becomes clear, though, that we are once again in HCE's home.  We see "the sycomores, all four of them" -- the four old men -- watching over what is presumably HCE's bed.  (The four old men are here twice identified as "esker, newcsle, saggard, crumlin," which, McHugh notes, were the four royal manors of Dublin formed by Henry II from the lands of Viking kings.)  The four old men (who the secondary sources suggest are the four bedposts of HCE's bed) hear something from the room of the twins, Kevin Mary (Shaun, the "nicechild") and Jerry Godolphing (Shem, the "badbrat").  Meanwile, Isabel, "the only girl they loved," lay sleeping "in her april cot," dreaming of lives as a nun, saint, and widow who will live the Viconian cycle:  "win me, woo me, wed me, ah weary me!"

Outside, along the "grassgross bumpinstrass" that happens to pass the pub, Wachtman Havelook walks his nightly rounds, which involves peeping ("seequeerscenes").  With a bottle of liquor in his pocket, he is "sequestering for lovers' lost propertied offices" the items left behind along the road by the revelers who have returned home after this "allpurgers' night."

Back inside the homestead, the housekeeper, Kate, is woken from her sleep by a noise that sounds like a knock on the door downstairs.  She thinks it might be the urinating girls from the park ("Schweeps's mingerals"), Shaun the Postman with a telegram for HCE, or the four old men ("the four hoarsmen on their apolkaloops, Norreys, Soothbys, Yates and Welks").  After walking down the stairs and raising the candle, she sees HCE naked on the floor, after having passed out drunk and "slumped to the throne" at the end of Book II, Chapter 3.  With the "whites of his pious eyebulbs," HCE swears Kate to silence.