Mr. Popper's Penguins

laughing so hard that nobody could hear the words of her song.
    Mr. Popper, who had followed the penguins up the stairs, stopped when he saw that it led to the orchestra pit.
    “I don’t think I’m supposed to go up there with the musicians,” he told Mrs. Popper.
    “The penguins did,” said Mrs. Popper.
    “Papa, you’d better get them off before they start biting the pegs and strings off the fiddles,” said Bill.
    “Oh dear, I just don’t know what to do,” said Mr. Popper, sitting down helplessly on the top step.
    “Then I will catch the penguins,” said Mrs. Popper, climbing up past him, with Janie and Bill following.
    When they saw Mrs. Popper coming after them, the penguins felt very guilty, because they knew they did not belong there. So they jumped up on the stage, ran over the footlights, and hid under the singing lady’s blue skirts.
    That stopped the singing entirely except for one high, shrill note that had not been written in the music.
     
    The birds loved the bright lights of the theater, and the great, laughing audiences, and all the traveling. There was always something new to see.
    From Stillwater out to the Pacific coast they traveled. It was a long way now to the little house at 432 Proudfoot Avenue, where the Poppers had had to worry about whether their money would hold out until spring.
    And every week they got a check for five thousand dollars.
    When they were not actually playing in some theater, or traveling on trains between cities, their life was spent in the larger hotels.
    Now and then a startled hotelkeeper would object to having the birds register there.
    “Why, we don’t even allow lap dogs in this hotel,” he would say.
    “Yes, but do you have any rule against penguins?” Mr. Popper would ask.
    Then the hotelkeeper would have to admit that there was no rule at all about penguins. And of course, when he saw how neat the penguins were, and how other guests came to his hotel in the hope of seeing them, he was very glad to have them. You might think that a large hotel would offer a great many opportunities for mischief to a lot of penguins, but they behaved very well, on the whole, never doing anything worse than riding up and down too often in the elevators, and occasionally biting the brass buttons off some bell-boy’s uniform.
    Five thousand dollars a week may sound like a great deal of money, and yet the Poppers were far from rich. It was quite expensive to live in grand hotels and travel about town in taxicabs. Mr. Popper often thought that the penguins could just as well have walked back and forth between hotels and theaters, but every one of their walks looked so much like a parade that it always tied up the traffic. So Mr. Popper, who never liked to be a nuisance to anyone, always took taxis instead.
    It was expensive to have huge cakes of ice brought up to their hotel rooms, to cool the penguins. The bills in the fine restaurants where the Poppers often took their meals were often dreadfully high. Fortunately, however, the penguins’ food had stopped being an expense to them. On the road, they had to give up having tank cars of live fish shipped to them, because it was so hard to get deliveries on time. So they went back to feeding the birds on canned shrimps.
    This cost them absolutely nothing, for Mr. Popper had written a testimonial saying: “Popper’s Performing Penguins thrive on Owens’ Oceanic Shrimp.”
    This statement, with a picture of the twelve penguins, was printed in all the leading magazines, and the Owens Oceanic Shrimp Company gave Mr. Popper an order that was good for free cans of shrimps at any grocery store anywhere in the country.
    Several other companies, such as the Great Western Spinach Growers’ Association and the Energetic Breakfast Oats Company, wanted him to recommend their product, too, and offered him large sums of cash. But the penguins simply refused to eat spinach or oats, and Mr. Popper was much too honest to say they would, even though he knew the money would come in handy.
    From the Pacific coast they turned east again, to cross the continent. They had time enough, on this brief tour, to touch only the larger cities. After Minneapolis, they played Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Philadelphia.
    Wherever they went, their reputation traveled ahead of them. When, early in April, they reached Boston, huge crowds awaited them in the railway station.
    Up to now, it had not been too difficult to keep the penguins