He passed his hands over his face. The world after all is not made
entirely for singing-birds; there is such a thing as proportion.
Singing-birds may become a luxury, an indulgence, an excess.

Did the birds eat the fruit in Paradise?

Perhaps there they worked for some collective musical effect, had some
sort of conductor in the place of this--hullabaloo....

He decided to walk about the room for a time and then remake his bed....

The sunrise found the bishop with his head and shoulders out of the
window trying to see that blackbird. He just wanted to look at it. He
was persuaded it was a quite exceptional blackbird.

Again came that oppressive sense of the futility of the contemporary
church, but this time it came in the most grotesque form. For hanging
half out of the casement he was suddenly reminded of St. Francis of
Assisi, and how at his rebuke the wheeling swallow stilled their cries.

But it was all so different then.

(3)


It was only after he had passed four similar nights, with intervening
days of lassitude and afternoon siestas, that the bishop realized that
he was in the grip of insomnia.