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money?“
    “What is the trouble?” asked Mr. Popper.
    “Well, of course, the penguins have to eat, but have you any idea what the bills for all those live fish are? I’m sure I don’t know how we’re ever going to pay for them. And the engineer who put in the basement freezing plant keeps ringing the doorbell and asking for his money.”
    “Is our money all gone?” asked Mr. Popper quietly.
    “Practically all. Of course when it is all gone, maybe we could eat the twelve penguins for a while.”
    “Oh no, Mamma,” said Mr. Popper. “You don’t mean that.”
    “Well, I don’t suppose I really could enjoy eating them, especially Greta and Isabella,” said Mrs. Popper.
    “It would break the children’s hearts, too,” said Mr. Popper. He sat there thoughtfully for quite a while.
    “I have an idea, Mamma,” he said at last.
    “Maybe we could sell them to somebody, and then we would have a little money to live on,” said Mrs. Popper.
    “No,” said Mr. Popper, “I have a better idea. We will keep the penguins. Mamma, you have heard of trained seals, acting in theaters?”
    “Of course I have heard of trained seals,” answered Mrs. Popper. “I even saw some once. They balanced balls on the ends of their noses.”
    “Very well then,” said Mr. Popper, “if there can be trained dogs and trained seals, why can’t there be trained penguins?”
    “Perhaps you are right, Papa.”
    “Of course I am right. And you can help me train the penguins.”
    The next day they had the piano moved down into the basement at one end of the ice rink. Mrs. Popper had not played the piano since she had married Mr. Popper, but with a little practice she soon began to remember some of the pieces she had forgotten.
    “What these penguins like to do most,” said Mr. Popper, “is to drill like an army, to watch Nelson and Columbus get in a fight with each other, and to climb up steps and toboggan down. And so we will build our act around those tricks.”
    “They don’t need costumes, anyway,” said Mrs. Popper, looking at the droll little figures. “They already have a costume.”
    So Mrs. Popper picked out three different tunes to play on the basement piano, one for each different kind of act. Soon the penguins knew, from hearing the music, just what they were to do.
    When they were supposed to parade like a lot of soldiers, Mrs. Popper played Schubert’s “Military March.”
    When Nelson and Columbus were to fight each other with their flippers, Mrs. Popper played the “Merry Widow Waltz.”
    When the penguins were supposed to climb and toboggan, Janie and Bill would drag out into the middle of the ice two portable stepladders and a board that Mr. Popper had used when he was decorating houses. Then Mrs. Popper would play a pretty, descriptive piece called “By the Brook.”
    It was cold in the cellar, of course, so that Mrs. Popper had to learn to play the piano with her gloves on.
    By the end of January, Mr. Popper was sure the penguins were ready to appear in any theater in the country.
     

Chapter XIV

Mr. Greenbaum
     
    OOK HERE,” said Mr. Popper at breakfast one morning. “It says here in the Morning Chronicle that Mr. Greenbaum, the owner of the Palace Theater, is in town. He’s got a string of theaters all over the country ; so I guess we had better go down and see him.”
    That evening — it was Saturday, the twenty-ninth of January — the Popper family and their twelve trained penguins, two of them carrying flags in their beaks, left the house to find the Palace Theater.
    The penguins were now so well trained that Mr. Popper decided that it was not necessary to keep them on leashes. Indeed, they walked to the bus line very nicely in the following line of march: —

     
    The bus stopped at the corner, and before the astonished driver could protest, they had all climbed on and the bus was on its way.
    “Do I pay half-fare for the birds, or do they go free?” asked Mr. Popper.
    “Janie goes