Mr. Popper's Penguins

a three-legged stork,” said the photographer.
    “This bird of yours — ” said the reporter. “Is it a he or a she? The public will want to know.”
    Mr. Popper hesitated. “Well, I call it Captain Cook.“
    “That makes it a he,” said the reporter, writing rapidly in his notebook.
    Still curious, Captain Cook started walking round and round the tripod, till the clothesline, the penguin, Mr. Popper and the tripod were all tangled up.

    At the advice of one of the bystanders, the tangle was finally straightened out by Mr. Popper’s walking around the tripod three times in the opposite direction. At last, Captain Cook, standing still beside Mr. Popper, consented to pose.
    Mr. Popper straightened his tie, and the cameraman snapped the picture. Captain Cook shut his eyes, and this is the way his picture appeared later in all the newspapers.
    “One last question,” said the reporter. “Where did you get your strange pet?”
    “From Admiral Drake, the South Pole explorer. He sent him to me for a present.”
    “Yeah,” said the reporter. “Anyway, it’s a good story.” The two young men jumped into their car. Mr. Popper and Captain Cook continued their walk, with quite a crowd following and asking questions. The crowd was getting so thick that, in order to escape, Mr. Popper led Captain Cook into a barbershop.
    The man who kept the barbershop had, up to this time, been a very good friend of Mr. Popper’s.
     

Chapter IX

In the Barber Shop
     
    T WAS very quiet in the barbershop. The barber was shaving an elderly gentleman.
    Captain Cook found this spectacle very interesting, and in order to get a better view, he jumped up on the mirror ledge.
    “Good night!” said the barber.
    The gentleman in the barber’s chair, his face already white with lather, half-lifted his head to see what had happened.

    “ Gook! ” said the penguin, flapping his flippers and reaching out his long beak toward the lather on the gentleman’s face.
    With a yell and a leap, the gentleman rose from his reclining position, left the barber’s chair, and fled into the street, not even stopping for his coat and hat.
    “Gaw!” said Captain.
    “Hey,” said the barber to Mr. Popper. “Take that thing out of my shop. This is no zoo. What’s the idea?”
    “Do you mind if I take him out your back door?” asked Mr. Popper.
    “Any door,” said the barber, “as long as it’s quick. Now it’s biting the teeth off my combs.”
    Mr. Popper took Captain Cook in his arms, and amid cries of “ Quork? “
    “ Gawk!” and “Ork!” made his way out of the shop and its back room and out a door into an alley.
    Captain Cook now discovered his first back stairway.
    Mr. Popper discovered that when a penguin has found steps going up somewhere, it is absolutely impossible to keep him from climbing them.
    “All right,” said Mr. Popper, panting up the steps behind Captain Cook. “I suppose, being a bird, and one that can’t fly, you have to go up in the air somehow, so you like to climb stairs. Well, it’s a good thing this building has only three stories. Come on. Let’s see what you can do.”
    Slowly but unwearyingly, Captain Cook lifted one pink foot after another from one step to the next, followed by Mr. Popper at the other end of the clothesline.
    At last they came to the top landing.
    “Now what?” inquired Mr. Popper of Captain Cook.
    Finding there were no more steps to climb, Captain Cook turned around and surveyed the steps that now went down.
    Then he raised his flippers and leaned forward.
    Mr. Popper, who was still panting for breath, had not supposed the determined bird would plunge so quickly. He should have remembered that penguins will toboggan whenever they get a chance.
    Perhaps he had been unwise in tying one end of the clothesline to his own wrist.
    At any rate, this time Mr. Popper found himself suddenly sliding, on his own white-clad stomach, down the three flights of steps. This delighted the penguin, who was enjoying his own slide just ahead of Mr. Popper.
    When they reached the bottom, Captain Cook was so eager to go up again that Mr. Popper had to call a taxi, to distract him.
    “432 Proudfoot Avenue,” said Mr. Popper to the driver.
    The driver, who was a kind and polite man, did not laugh at his oddly assorted passengers until he had been paid.
    “Oh dear!” said Mrs. Popper, when she opened the door to her husband. “You looked so neat and handsome when you started for your walk. And now