hould grow worse, I could
go and get you."

THE PENGUINS' ROCK

This is the season for penguins.

From April to the end of May, before the Parisian visitors arrive, one
sees, all at once, on the little beach at Etretat several old gentlemen,
booted and belted in shooting costume. They spend four or five days at
the Hotel Hauville, disappear, and return again three weeks later. Then,
after a fresh sojourn, they go away altogether.

One sees them again the following spring.

These are the last penguin hunters, what remain of the old set. There
were about twenty enthusiasts thirty or forty years ago; now there are
only a few of the enthusiastic sportsmen.

The penguin is a very rare bird of passage, with peculiar habits. It
lives the greater part of the year in the latitude of Newfoundland and
the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon. But in the breeding season a
flight of emigrants crosses the ocean and comes every year to the same
spot to lay their eggs, to the Penguins' Rock near Etretat. They are
found nowhere else, only there. They have always come there, have always
been chased away, but return again, and will always return. As soon as
the young birds are grown they all fly away, and disappear for a year.

Why do they not go elsewhere? Why not choose some other spot on the long
white, unending cliff that extends from the Pas-de-Calais to Havre? What
force, what invincible instinct, what custom of centuries impels these
birds to come back to this place? What first migration, what tempest,
possibly, once cast their ancestors on this rock? And why do the
children, the grandchildren, all the descendants of the first parents
always return here?

There are not many of them, a hundred at most, as if one single family,
maintaining the tradition, made this annual pilgrimage.

And each spring, as soon as the little wandering tribe has taken up its
abode an the rock, the same sportsmen also reappear in the village. One
knew them formerly when they were young; now they are old, but constant
to the regular appointment which they have kept for thirty or forty
years. They would not miss it for anything in the world.

It was an April evening in one of the later years. Three of the old
sportsmen had arrived; one was missing--M. d'Arnelles.

He had written to no one, given no account of himself. But he was not
dead, like so many of the rest; they would have heard of it. At length,
tired of waiting for him, the other t