HEROIC EXPLORER.  I should like to have a receipt for the eggs, if you please.

CHIEF CUSTODIAN.  It is not necessary:  it is all right.  You needn’t wait.

HEROIC EXPLORER.  I should like to have a receipt.

But by this time the Chief Custodian’s attention is again devoted wholly to the Person of Importance.  Feeling that to persist in overhearing their conversation would be an indelicacy, the Heroic Explorer politely leaves the room, and establishes himself on a chair in a gloomy passage outside, where he wiles away the time by rehearsing in his imagination how he will tell off the Chief Custodian when the Person of Importance retires.  But this the Person of Importance shows no sign of doing, and the Explorer’s thoughts and intentions become darker and darker.  As the day wears on, minor officials, passing to and from the Presence, look at him doubtfully and ask his business.  The reply is always the same, “I am waiting for a receipt for some penguins’ eggs.”  At last it becomes clear from the Explorer’s expression that what he is really waiting for is not to take a receipt but to commit murder.  Presumably this is reported to the destined victim:  at all events the receipt finally comes; and the Explorer goes his way with it, feeling that he has behaved like a perfect gentleman, but so very dissatisfied with that vapid consolation that for hours he continues his imaginary rehearsals of what he would have liked to have done to that Custodian (mostly with his boots) by way of teaching him manners.

Some time after this I visited the Natural History Museum with Captain Scott’s sister.  After a slight preliminary skirmish in which we convinced a minor custodian that the specimens brought by the expedition from the Antarctic did not include the moths we found preying on some of them, Miss Scott expressed a wish to see the penguins’ eggs.  Thereupon the minor custodians flatly denied that any such eggs were in existence or in their possession.  Now Miss Scott was her brother’s sister; and she showed so little disposition to take this lying down that I was glad to get her away with no worse consequences than a profanely emphasized threat on my part that if we did not receive ample satisfaction in writing within twenty-four hours as to the safety of the eggs England would reverberate with the tale.

The ultimatum was effectual; and due satisfaction was forthcoming in time; but I was relieved when I learnt later on that they had been entrusted to Professor Assheton for the necessary microscopic examination.  But he died before he could approach the task; and the eggs passed into the hands of Professor Cossar Ewart of Edinburgh University.

His report is as follows: 

FOOTNOTES: 

[150] See pp. xxxix-xlv.

[151] A thermometer which registered -77 deg. at the Winter Quarters
of H.M.S.  Alert on March 4, 1876, is preserved by the Royal
Geographical Society.  I do not know whether it was screened.