As they have no hour glasses, they measure their time by a kind of clepsydra. It is a small brass basin, about four inches in diameter, made thin enough to float on the water, with a hole in the bottom which admits as much as to fill it exactly in one gurry, or twenty-two and a half minutes. The sinking, therefore, of the vessel, is the signal for striking the gurry, and warning the inhabitants.

He semeth a sysmatyke Or els an heretike, For fayth in hym is faynte.

As we have seen, Stephen identifies with the poet-hero, and Fergus's call becomes a sirensong for his mother.

OF all th' enamell'd race, whose silvery wing / Waves to the tepid zephyrs of the spring.