e immense, tender, terrible, heart-breaking
beauty and solemnity of Eggs. If there had been one person in that
garden who had not known through all his or her innermost being that if
an Egg were taken away or hurt the whole world would whirl round and
crash through space and come to an end--if there had been even one who
did not feel it and act accordingly there could have been no happiness
even in that golden springtime air. But they all knew it and felt it
and the robin and his mate knew they knew it.

At first the robin watched Mary and Colin with sharp anxiety. For some
mysterious reason he knew he need not watch Dickon. The first moment
he set his dew-bright black eye on Dickon he knew he was not a stranger
but a sort of robin without beak or feathers. He could speak robin
(which is a quite distinct language not to be mistaken for any other).
To speak robin to a robin is like speaking French to a Frenchman.
Dickon always spoke it to the robin himself, so the queer gibberish he
used when he spoke to humans did not matter in the least. The robin
thought he spoke this gibberish to them because they were not
intelligent enough to understand feathered speech. His movements also
were robin. They never startled one by being sudden enough to seem
dangerous or threatening. Any robin could understand Dickon, so his
presence was not even disturbing.

But at the outset it seemed necessary to be on guard against the other
two. In the first place the boy creature did not come into the garden
on his legs. He was pushed in on a thing with wheels and the skins of
wild animals were thrown over him. That in itself was doubtful. Then
when he began to stand up and move about he did it in a queer
unaccustomed way and the others seemed to have to help him. The robin
used to secrete himself in a bush and watch this anxiously, his head
tilted first on one side and then on the other. He thought that the
slow movements might mean that he was preparing to pounce, as cats do.
When cats are preparing to pounce they creep over the ground very
slowly. The robin talked this over with his mate a great deal for a
few days but after that he decided not to speak of the subject because
her terror was so great that he was afraid it might be injurious to the
Eggs.

When the boy began to walk by himself and even to move more quickly it
was an immense relief. But for a long time--or it seemed a long time
to the robin--he was a source of