long beak sufficiently high to bolt it. Meanwhile, his friends collected about him and remonstrated, with many flops and gobbles, betting him all his fish to nothing that he would lose it after all; this way they chased that bag, and that way, while the bagger, in much trepidation and with many desperate heaves, wildly sought remote corners away from his persecutors. Now, by the corner of the club premises stands an appliance, the emblem of authority, the instrument of justice, and the terror of the evilly-disposed pelican—a birch-broom. This, brandished in the hands of Church, caused a sudden and awful collapse of the drag-nets, an opening, a shower of fish and many snaps; wherefrom walked away many pelicans with fish, and one with none, who had looked to take all. The moral is plain to the verge of ugliness.
A pelican has no tongue—or none to speak of. It is a mere little knob scarcely the size of a cherry. The long, long meditations of the pelican (lasting between feeding times) are given up to consideration whether or not the disgrace of this deficiency is counterbalanced by the greater capacity for fish which it gives the pouch. After all, it is only another instance of that commercial honesty which makes the pelican pay for his beak out of his legs; he gives his tongue for a pouch. There should be a legend of the pelican applying honestly to Adam to buy a pouch, and the wily stork waiting and waiting on the chance of snatching one without paying for it, until all had been served out; afterwards living all its life
