to the fish, a man-o'-war hawk espies him from a distance of, say, five miles. Emitting a quivering shriek of hunger, the strong-winged sufferer cleaves the intervening air with the speed of a telegram, and has siezed and swallowed the fish before his own belated shriek arrives.
The penguin, living in total ignorance of the man-o'-war hawk's existence, vaguely and half-amusedly apprehends his deprivation. In this way. You have heard the boarding-house girl rap at your bedroom door, and tell you that breakfast is on the table. You have thought to yourself: Now I'm turning out; now I'm putting on my; now, my socks; now—Why, I'm in bed still, and no nearer breakfast than at first! Here we have a reproduction of the penguin's train of thought, plus the slight shock of surprise which marks your own relatively imperfect organisation. The whole thing does n't amount to a crumpled rose-leaf beneath the penguin's base; so he apathetically depresses his dreamy eyes in casual quest of another fish.
Now if the feathered martyr could only wait one minute, he might obtain the second morsel on the same terms as the first; but Nature has so constructed him that, in his estimation, the most important of all economies is the economy of time; and his Dollond eye has descried another penguin, seven miles distant, in the very act of dipping for a fish. Can he make the return trip? He must chance it. He negotiates with lightning speed the interspace between his tortured stomach and the second penguin's provender, whilst his own steam-siren screech of famine comes feebly halting after, and blends with the desolate plop of his prey into the abysmal emptiness of his ever-yearning epigastrium. Then, wheeling madly round—his Connemara complaint freshly whetted by what he has taken— he sees the first penguin dropping asleep as the fish he has just caught slides down head-foremost, to be assimilated by the simple clockwork of his interior.
Too late, by full fifteen seconds! and the wild despair of lost opportunity lends a horrid eeriness to the banshee utterance with which the man-o'-war hawk greets this crushing discovery, barbed, as it is, by the prior knowledge that every penguin within twenty miles is in Nirvana for the present. Now he must wait—ah! heavens, wait!—while one with moderate haste might tell a hundred. By that time, the bird beside him will have caught another fish; and though it be only—By my faith, he must wait longer; for the penguin, concluding that his own appetite will be more finely matured by another half-hour's sleep, is just dozing off. Woe for the man-o'-war hawk! he must decide on something without delay, and he must do that something quickly—quickly—quickly—for there will be loafing enough in the grave, as the great American moralist says.
But, five hundred miles away across the restless, hungry waste of waters is another rock, where penguins steep themselves in sinless voluptuousness; and, with one prolonged, ear-splitting yell, wrung from him by the still-increasing torment of his fell disease, the unhappy bird expands his Paradise-Lost pinions, and, with the speed of a comet passing its perihelion, sweeps away to that rock; for, like Louis XVI., he knows geography.
