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 some anxiety. He did not act as the other
humans did. He seemed very fond of walking but he had a way of sitting
or lying down for a while and then getting up in a disconcerting manner
to begin again.

One day the robin remembered that when he himself had been made to learn
to fly by his parents he had done much the same sort of thing. He had
taken short flights of a few yards and then had been obliged to rest. So
it occurred to him th