They take turns in sitting on their eggs, and after many days the fathers may be seen waddling down towards the sea with their shirt-fronts muddied, their long trick done.  It may be a fortnight before they return, well-fed, clean, pleased with life, and with a grim determination to relieve their wives, to do their job.  Sometimes they are met by others going to bathe.  They stop and pass the time of day.  Well!  Perhaps it would be more pleasant, and what does a day or two matter anyhow.  They turn; clean and dirty alike are off to the seaside again.  This is when they say, “The women are splendid.”

Life is too strenuous for them to have any use for the virtues of brotherly love, good works, charity and benevolence.  When they mate the best thief wins:  when they nest the best pair of thieves hatch out their eggs.  In a long unbroken stream, which stretches down below the sea-ice horizon, they march in from the open sea.  Some are walking on their human feet:  others tobogganing upon their shiny white breasts.  After their long walk they must have a sleep, and then the gentlemen make their way into the already crowded rookery to find them wives.  But first a suitor must find, or steal, a pebble, for such are the penguin jewels:  they are of lava, black, russet or grey, with almond-shaped crystals bedded in them.  They are rare and of all sizes, but that which is most valued is the size of a pigeon’s egg.  Armed with one of these he courts his maid, laying it at her feet.  If accepted he steals still more stones:  she guards them jealously, taking in the meantime any safe opportunity to pick others from under her nearest neighbours.  Any penguin which is unable to fight and steal successfully fails to make a good high nest, or loses it when made.  Then comes a blizzard, and after that a thaw:  for it thaws sometimes right down by the sea-shore where the Adelies have their nurseries.  The eggs of the strong and wicked hatch out, but those of the weak are addled.  You must have a jolly good pile of stones to hatch eggs after a blizzard like that in December 1911, when the rookeries were completely snow-covered:  nests, eggs, parents and all.

Once hatched the chicks grow quickly from pretty grey atoms of down to black lumps of stomach topped by a small and quite inadequate head.  They are two or more weeks old, and they leave their parents, or their parents leave them, I do not know which.  If socialism be the nationalization of the means of production and distribution, then they are socialists.  They divide into parents and children.  The adult community comes up from the open sea, bringing food inside them:  they are full of half-digested shrimps.  But not for their own children:  these, if not already dead, are lost in a crowd of hungry tottering infants which besiege each food-provider as he arrives.  But not all of them can get food, though all of them are hungry.  Some have already been behindhand too long:  they have not managed to secure food for days, and they are weak and cold and very weary.