th a monotonous motion on the beach in a sullen sort
of way, as if it was curbed by a higher law for the present, but would
revenge itself bye-and-bye when it had free play--they would stand
together in a cluster, drying and dressing themselves, talking together
the while in their gruff barking voice, as if congratulating each other
on their safe landing; and then, again, all at once, as if by
preconcerted order, they would start scrambling off in a body over the
stony causeway that lay between the beach and their rookery in the
scrub, many falling down by the way and picking themselves up again by
their flappers, their bodies being apparently too weighty for their
legs. The whole lot thus waddled and rolled along, like a number of old
gentlemen with gouty feet, until they reached one particular road into
the tussock-grass thicket, which their repeated passage had worn smooth;
and, along this they passed in single file in the funniest fashion
imaginable. The performance altogether more resembled a scene in a
pantomime than anything else!

This was not all, either.

The onlookers had only seen half the play; for, no sooner had this party
of excursionists returned home than another band of equal numbers
appeared coming out of the rookery from a second path, almost parallel
with the first but distinctly separated by a hedge of brushwood--so as
to prevent the birds going to and from the sea from interfering with
each other's movements.

These new--comers, when they got out of the grass on to the beach--which
they reached in a similar sprawling way to that in which the others had
before traversed the intervening space, "jest as if they were all drunk,
every mother's son of 'em!" as the skipper had said--stopped, similarly,
to have a chat, telling each other probably their various plans for
fishing; and then, after three or four minutes of noisy conversation, in
which they barked and growled as if quarrelling vehemently, they would
scuttle down with one consent in a group over the stones into the water.

From this spot, once they had dived in, a long line of ripples,
radiating outwards towards the open sea, like that caused by a pebble
flung into a pond, was the only indication, as far as could be seen,
that the penguins were below the surface, not a head or beak showing.

Such was the ordinary procedure of the penguins, according to what Fritz
and the others noticed on the first day of the brothers' landing on the
isl