But somehow I couldn't get up and dress. I seemed to have got very fond of
my own bed, and the queer old crows, as I had called them from babyhood, on
the chintz curtains, and the Chinese paper on the walk with the strangest
birds and creeping things on it. It Was a lovely spring morning, and the
sun was shining gloriously. I knew that the rain of the last night must be
glittering on the grass and the young leaves; and I heard the birds singing
as if they knew far more than mere human beings, and believed a great deal
more than they knew. Nobody will persuade me that the birds don't mean it;
that they sing from any thing else than gladness of heart. And if they
don't think about cats and guns, why should they? Even when they fall on
the ground, it is not without our Father. How horridly dull and stupid it
seems to say that "without your Father" means without _his knowing it_. The
Father's mere _knowledge_ of a thing--if that could be, which my father
says can't--is not the Father. The Father's tenderness and care and love of
it all the time, that is the not falling without him. When the cat kills
the bird, as I have seen happen so often in our poor little London garden,
God yet saves his bird from his cat. There is nothing so bad as it looks to
our half-sight, our blinding perceptions. My father used to say we are all
walking in a spiritual twilight, and are all more or less affected with
twilight blindness, as some people are physically. Percivale, for one, who
is as brave as any wife could wish, is far more timid than I am in crossing
a London street in the twilight; he can't see what is coming, and fancies
he sees what is not coming. But then he has faith in me, and never starts
when I am leading him.

Well, the birds were singing, and Dora and the boys were making a great
chatter, like a whole colony of sparrows, under my window. Still I felt as
if I had twenty questions to settle before I could get up comfortably, and
so lay on and on till the breakfast-bell rang: and I was not more than half