ome aware of their Penguinity, it is in a funny,
shamefaced fashion, as if they had been up to boyish tricks their
manhood should blush for. Came Bobbie to me the other day and
confessed that he had about made up his mind to be "serious."

"Everybody thinks I'm a joke," he said, with a melancholy grin; "they
always expect me to say something asinine, and get ready to laugh
before I speak. What shall I do?"

"Do!" I cried. "Do what you've been doing, only do it more. Keep right
on being a Penguin, and God bless you!"

Bobbie looked perplexed and a little hurt; but I was too wise to
explain, and three minutes later he was rattling off some delicious
absurdity to my four-year-old hopeful, who had fallen down on his nose
and needed comforting--and a handkerchief. Bobbie was supplying the
latter from his pocket, and from his penguinacious brain the former
was effectively coming in the shape of a description of Rocky Mountain
sheep, which, according to Bobbie, have right-side legs much shorter
than their left-side legs, so they can run along the mountain slopes
without ever falling on _their_ noses.

"But how do they get back?" asks the hopeful, still bleeding, but
eager for information.

"They put their heads between their hind legs and run backward," says
Bobbie. "They have long necks, you know."

That, of course, may be unnatural history, but it was a very present
help in time of trouble. Indeed, it made Bobbie, as well as the boy,
forget, and I have heard no more of his dreadful intention to be
serious.

Some one--probably it was Emerson--once said, "Each man has his own
vocation. The talent is the call." It is no small thing, in this grim
world, to make people smile, to be absurd for their alleviation, to
render all things "sympathetically ridiculous" for a time, to bear in
a chalice of mirth the water of Lethe. If one's talent lies that way,
why, the call should be clear! The Penguin Person should have no doubt
or shame of his vocation, nor should anyone else allow him to. Little
Joe Weber, who was on the stage the most perfect example of
Penguinity, was as a stage character beloved of all the thousands who
saw him. He heard his call and followed his vocation, and honor and
wealth and fame are now his. The merry host of Penguin Persons who
move outside the radius of the spluttering calcium, whose proscenium
is the door frame of a home, may earn neither wealth nor fame by doing
as he has done, but they will win