g life too
seriously; they make everything "sympathetically ridiculous"; they are
often "as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land."

But, at the very outset, I would not be misunderstood. I do not mean
that a Penguin Person must resemble the amusing bird in physical
aspect. There are, I know, certain people, a far more numerous class
than is generally supposed, who see in almost everybody a resemblance
to some animal, bird, or fish. I am one of these people myself. It is
on record as far back as the fourth generation that some one of my
successive ancestors had the same unhappy faculty, for it is unhappy,
since it imposes on the person who resembles for us a pig, in our
thoughts of him, the attributes of that beast, and so on through the
natural history catalogue. It is not pleasant to watch a puma kitten
sitting beside you in the opera house, especially when your mere brain
tells you she is probably a sweet, even-tempered little matron, or to
wait in pained expectancy for your large-eared minister to bray, even
though you know he will not depart from his measured exposition of
sound and sane doctrine. However, the Penguin Persons are such by
virtue of their moral and mental attributes solely, of the similar
effect they produce on those about them by their personalities. I have
never met a man yet who physically resembled a penguin, though I fancy
the experience would be interesting.

Still less would I have it understood that Penguin Persons are stupid.
Far from it. Dr. Crothers declares, in his _Gentle Reader_, that he
would not like to be neighbor to a wit. "It would be like being in
proximity to a live wire," he says. "A certain insulating film of
kindly stupidity is needed to give a margin of safety to human
intercourse." I do not think that Dr. Crothers could have known a
Penguin Person when he wrote that. The Penguin Person is not a wit,
there is no barb to his shafts of fun, no uneasiness from his
preternatural cleverness, for he is not preternaturally clever. You
never feel unable to cope with him, you never feel your mind keyed to
an unusual alertness to follow him; you feel, indeed, a sense of
comforting superiority, for, after all, you _do_ take the world so
much more seriously than he! And yet he is not stupid; he is bright,
alert, "kindly," to be sure, but delightfully humorous, deliciously
droll. Life with him appears to be one huge joke, and there is an
unction about him, a contagion in his point