rval,
Fritz was able to comprehend the situation and see his brother. Poor
Eric was lying face downwards, half-suffocated amidst the mass of bird
refuse, with the wheelbarrow, which had got turned over in some
mysterious way or other, lying over him and preventing him from rising.
Really, but for Fritz's speedy arrival, the lad might have lost his life
in so strange a fashion, for he was quite speechless and his breath gone
when his brother lifted him up.

Nor was this the worst either.

The penguins had made such a determined onslaught on Eric with their
heavy beaks and flapping wings, and possibly too with their webbed feet
when he was down struggling amongst them, that his clothes were all torn
to rags; while his legs and body were bleeding profusely from the bites
and scratches he had received. His face alone escaped injury, from the
fact of its being buried in the guano debris.

Fritz took hold of him, after pulling away the wheelbarrow, and lugged
him outside the penguin colony; when the lad, recovering presently, was
able to tell the incidents of the adventure, laughing subsequently at
its ridiculous aspect. It seemed funny, he explained, that he, a sailor
who had battled with the storms of the ocean and feared nothing, should
be ignominiously beaten back by a flock of birds that were more stupid
than geese!

He had thought it easy enough to get the guano for the garden, he said,
but he had overrated his ability or rather, underrated the obstacles in
his way; for, no sooner had he left the level ground which they had
selected for their little clearing, than he found that the tussock-
grass, which appeared as light and graceful in the distance as waving
corn, grew into a nearly-impenetrable jungle.

The root-clumps, or "tussocks" of the grass--whence its name--were two
or three feet in width, and grew into a mound about a foot high, the
spaces intervening between, which the penguins utilised for their nests,
averaging about eighteen inches apart, as if the grass had been almost
planted in mathematical order.

It would have been hard enough to wheel in the wheelbarrow between the
clumps, Eric remarked, if all else had been plain sailing; but since, as
he pointed out and as Fritz indeed could see for himself, the stems of
the thick grass raised themselves up to the height of seven or eight
feet from the roots, besides interweaving their blades with those of
adjoining clumps, the difficulty of passing throu