detestable things singing birds were. A. blackbird had gripped his
attention. Never had he heard such vain repetitions. He struggled
against the dark mood of criticism. "He prayeth best who loveth best--"

No, he did not love the birds. It was useless to pretend. Whatever one
may say about other birds a cuckoo is a low detestable cad of a bird.

Then the bishop began to be particularly tormented by a bird that made a
short, insistent, wheezing sound at regular intervals of perhaps twenty
seconds. If a bird could have whooping-cough, that, he thought, was the
sort of whoop it would have. But even if it had whooping-cough he could
not pity it. He hung in its intervals waiting for the return of the
wheeze.

And then that blackbird reasserted itself. It had a rich boastful note;
it seemed proud of its noisy reiteration of simple self-assertion. For
some obscure reason the phrase "oleographic sounds" drifted into the
bishop's thoughts. This bird produced the peculiar and irrational
impression that it had recently made a considerable sum of money by
shrewd industrialism. It was, he thought grimly, a genuine Princhester
blackbird.

This wickedly uncharitable reference to his diocese ran all unchallenged
through the bishop's mind. And others no less wicked followed it.

Once during his summer holidays in Florence he and Lady Ella had
subscribed to an association for the protection of song-birds. He
recalled this now with a mild wonder. It seemed to him that perhaps
after all it was as well to let fruit-growers and Italians deal with
singing-birds in their own way. Perhaps after all they had a wisdom....