“Yes,” he replied, “I am so named in the world from my habit of minding other people’s affairs and neglecting my own; so sinking myself, what can I do for you? Listen, my friend,” said this sublime bird; “not far from here is an island called the ‘Isle of Penguins.’ It is only inhabited by birds of your tribe. They are all of them equally ugly; go there, and who knows, you may even be thought handsome.”
“Am I then so unsightly?” said I.
“Yes,” he said, “you are as unlike the gull as the grub is unlike the butterfly.”
VIII.
During our voyage, encountering a severe storm, we rode it tranquilly on the breast of the billows, while great ships, freighted with the wealth of the world, were wrecked and lost before our eyes. It was pitiful to hear the shrieks of the perishing sounding above the tempest, men and women who had braved the dangers of the deep, some to seek happier climes, others, the riches they were doomed never to enjoy.
At last through many dangers we reached the shores of the “Happy Island.”
“Let us pause here,” said my sage companion, “and note the native mode of seeking what I hold to be a myth—earthly happiness.”
Shaking ourselves dry, my friend, who had studied geography, elevated his beak, and casting his eye along its line, took our position from the sun. The result was curious and instructive to navigators, and even to mankind generally, not to mention birds. According to our calculations, we had been availing ourselves of every slant of wind to push ahead, and, strange to say, reached land a hundred miles astern of the point we started from. Had we been men, pioneers of civilisation, gifted with a sublime belief in our own powers, we should have no doubt proved to our own satisfaction that we had made unheard-of progress. Men and mules, without knowing it, go as often backwards as forwards.
My friend here remarked that the island was unknown, had never, in fact, found its place in any map. Our observations, therefore, cannot fail to prove useful.
“Let us go inland. If you don’t object?”