But how to define the forbidden?

He began to compose an address on Modern Literature (so-called).

It became acrimonious.

Before dawn the birds began to sing.

His mind had seemed to be a little tranquillized, there had been a distinct feeling of subsidence sleepwards, when first one and then another little creature roused itself and the bishop to greet the gathering daylight.

It became a little clamour, a misty sea of sound in which individuality appeared and disappeared.  For a time a distant cuckoo was very perceptible, like a landmark looming up over a fog, like the cuckoo in the Pastoral Symphony.

The bishop tried not to heed these sounds, but they were by their very nature insistent sounds.  He lay disregarding them acutely.

Presently he pulled the coverlet over his ears.

A little later he sat up in bed.

Again in a slight detail he marked his strange and novel detachment from the world of his upbringing.  His hallucination of disillusionment had spread from himself and his church and his faith to the whole animate creation.  He knew that these were the voices of “our feathered songsters,” that this was “a joyous chorus” greeting the day.  He knew that a wakeful bishop ought to bless these happy creatures, and join with them by reciting Ken’s morning hymn.  He made an effort that was more than half habit, to repeat and he repeated with a scowling face and the voice of a schoolmaster: 

“Awake my soul, and with the sun
Thy daily stage of duty run....”

He got no further.  He stopped short, sat still, thinking what utterly 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.