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help me move the nest into the other room. Then I will open all the windows and leave them open, and the penguins will be comfortable.”
    “They will be comfortable, all right,” said Mrs. Popper, “but what about us?”
    “We can wear our winter overcoats and hats in the house,” said Mr. Popper, as he got up to go around and open all the windows.
    “It certainly is colder,” said Mrs. Popper, sneezing. The next few days were even colder, but the Poppers soon got used to sitting around in their overcoats. Greta and Captain Cook always occupied the chairs nearest the open windows.
    One night, quite early in November, there was a blizzard, and when the Poppers got up in the morning, there were large drifts of snow all over the house.
    Mrs. Popper wanted to get her broom and have Mr. Popper bring his snow shovel to clear away the drifts, but the penguins were having so much fun in the snow that Mr. Popper insisted it should be left where it was.
    In fact, he even went so far as to bring an old garden hose up from the basement and sprinkle all the floors that night until the water was an inch deep. By the next morning all the Popper floors were covered with smooth ice, with snowdrifts around the edges near the open windows.
    Both Greta and Captain Cook were tremendously pleased with all that ice. They would go up on the snowdrift at one end of the living room, and run down, one behind the other, onto the ice, until they were running too fast to keep their balance. Then they would flop on their stomachs and toboggan across the slippery ice.
    This amused Bill and Janie so much that they tried it, too, on the stomachs of their overcoats. This in turn pleased the penguins greatly. Then Mr. Popper moved all the furniture in the living room to one side, so that the penguins and the children would have plenty of room for real sliding. It was a little hard at first to move the furniture, because the feet of the chairs had frozen into the ice.

    Toward afternoon the weather got warmer and the ice began to melt. “Now, Papa,” said Mrs. Popper, “you really must do something. We can’t go on like this.“
    “But Captain Cook and Greta are both fat and sleek, and the children have never been so rosy.”
    “It may be very healthy,” said Mrs. Popper, as she mopped up the flood, “but it’s very untidy.”
    “I will do something about it tomorrow,” said Mr.
    Popper.

     

Chapter XII

More Mouths to Feed
     
    O THE NEXT DAY Mr. Popper called an engineer and had a large freezing plant installed in the cellar, and took Captain Cook and Greta down there to live. Then he had the furnace taken out and moved upstairs into the living room. It looked very odd there, but, as Mrs. Popper said, it was a relief at least not to have to wear their overcoats all the time.
    Mr. Popper was quite worried when he found that all these changes were going to be very expensive. The refrigerating engineer was worried, too, when he found that Mr. Popper had practically no money. However, Mr. Popper promised to pay as soon as he could, and the man let him have everything on credit.
    It was a good thing that Mr. Popper got the penguins moved when he did, because Mrs. Popper had been right about the eggs. The rookery had scarcely been moved to the basement when Greta laid the first egg. Three days later the second one appeared.
    Since Mr. Popper knew that penguins lay only two eggs a season, he was astonished when, a little later, the third egg was found under Greta. Whether the change in climate had changed the penguins’ breeding habits, Mr. Popper never knew, but every third day a new one would appear until there were ten in all.
    Now penguin eggs are so large that the mother can sit on only two at a time, and this created quite a problem. Mr. Popper solved it, however, by distributing the extra eggs under hot-water bottles and electric heating-pads, kept just at penguin-body heat.
    The penguin chicks, when they began to hatch, were not so