llow the fashion and don the "ducks."

Owing to this new demand on the feathered colony it would seem like
exaggeration to state how many thousands came to an untimely end, in
addition to the numbers that were killed to supply the daily necessities
of the table and the large quantity which Mr Meldrum had caused to be
prepared and dried, like the rabbits, "for a rainy day;" while, as to
the eggs that were eaten--well, the least said about these the better!

From all of this it may be gathered that the penguins made a bad move
when they came back to their old breeding-place; but the stupid birds
never seemed to be aware that they could at any time save themselves by
flight if they liked, although they must have been somehow or other
acquainted with the deplorable fact--in a bird-like way--that their
rookery was becoming rapidly depopulated! No, notwithstanding that they
saw their friends and relatives repeatedly slaughtered before their very
eyes--their penguin parents, children, godfathers, godmothers, and first
cousins thus perishing at the hands of miscreants in human form, and
subsequently converted into food and clothing and to other "base uses"
by those who took their innocent lives--they never appeared to make an
effort in self-defence, either by executing a "strategical movement" or
otherwise!

The spirit of penguinism, so to speak, was dead, the bird colony
contenting themselves by grumbling, an infallible resource for all
similarly constituted creatures--in which respect, as Mr Lathrope was
pleased to put it, they resembled a class of modern politicians who need
not be alluded to here.

Amongst those included in the list of penguin slayers was one who
pursued them to the death--although rather through a desire for
malicious sport and self-gratification than from any actual necessity--
and this vindictive enemy was Master Maurice Negus.

The young gentlemen had developed many pleasing traits of character
during the comparatively short period during which he was brought into
public notice as one of the passengers of the ill-fated _Nancy Bell_;
but in none of these had he so well exemplified his natural and
ingenious bias of mind as in the little predilection, if it may be so
termed, for bird slaughter _in ovum_, which first saw the light in
Kerguelen Land.

Soon after the penguins came to breed there, Master Maurice noted them
carefully, and it pleased him much thereafter to go "bird-nesting," as
he called