A flashing family appeared riding on nondescript cycles. He watched them with half-shut eyes, caressing a quaint conceit that they were his thoughts whirling around in concrete form. The bursts of deafening applause seemed to soothe him. Presently a street-scene cloth was let down and a battered man appeared and sang a song about drink and twins and brokers. He threw such humourous gusto into the performance that Joyce laughed in spite of his preoccupation, and remained in amused anticipation of his second turn. The bell tinkled. The “comedian” came on and was greeted with vociferous applause. With music-hall realism he was dressed in prison-clothes, glengarry, woollen stockings, and black-arrowed suit all complete. He had made up his face into a startling brute. Joyce felt sick. He did not catch the first verse; only the concluding lines of the chorus, “I ‘ve done my bit of time, For ’itting of my missus on the chump, chump, chump.” But then the man began to speak, and Joyce could not help hearing. A horrible fascination held him. The ignoble figure poured out with grotesque and voluble cynicism the comic history of the prison-life; the plank-bed, the skilly, the oakum, the exercise-yard. He sketched his pals, detailed the sordid tricks for obtaining food, the mean malingering, the debasing habits. And all with a horrible fidelity. The audience shrieked with laughter. But Joyce lost sense of the mime. The man was real, one of the degraded creatures with whom he himself had once been indistinguishably mingled--a loathsome fact from the past. The smell of the prison floated over the footlights and filled his nostrils. All his overwrought nerves quivering with repulsion, he broke through the crowd hemming him in against the partition, and rushed down into the street. ***** How long and whither he walked he did not know. At last he found himself within familiar latitudes, outside the Angel Tavern. He was wet through from the fine, penetrating rain, tired, cold, and utterly miserable. The revulsion of feeling in the music-hall had thrown him back years in his self-esteem. The soil of the gaol had never seemed so ineffaceable. In the blaze of light by the tavern door he paused, irresolute. Then, remembering the disastrous results of an attempt years before to seek such consolation, he shivered and turned away. It was too dangerous. About a hundred yards further, a woman passed him, turned, and overtook him. “I thought it was you,” she said. He recognised the voice as that of Annie Stevens. It was not far from the spot where he had first met her, and where, some short time after, he had met her again. For months, however, he had lost sight of her. He recognised her voice, but her appearance was unfamiliar, and her face was half hidden by a Salvation Army bonnet. The apparent cynicism of her attire revolted him. “Why are you masquerading like this?” he asked, continuing to walk onwards.