As a band of spotless bathers returning to the rookery, their white breasts and black backs glistening with a fine metallic lustre in the sunlight, met a dirty and bedraggled party on its way out from the nesting ground, frequently both would stop, and the clean and dirty mingle together and chatter with one another for some minutes. If they were not speaking words in some language of their own, their whole appearance belied them, and as they stood, some in pairs, some in groups of three or more, chattering amicably together, it became evident that they were sociable animals, glad to meet one another, and, like many men, pleased with the excuse to forget for a while their duties at home, where their mates were waiting to be relieved for their own spell off the nests. After a variable period of this intercourse, the two parties would separate and continue on their respective ways, a clean stream issuing from the crowd in the direction of the rookery, a dirty one heading off towards the open water, but here it was seen that a few who had bathed and fed, and were already perhaps half-way home, had been persuaded to turn and accompany the others, and so back they would go again over the way they had come, to spend a few more hours in skylarking and splashing about in the sea. [Illustration: Fig. 47. DIVING FLAT INTO SHALLOW WATER (Page 83)] In speaking of these games of the penguins, I wish to lay emphasis on the fact that these hours of relaxation play a large part in their lives during the advanced part of the breeding period. They would spend hours in playing at a sort of "touch last" on the sea-ice near the water's edge. They never played on the ground of the rookery itself, but only on the sea-ice and the ice-foot and in the water, and I may here mention another favourite pastime of theirs. I have said that the tide flowed past the rookery at the rate of some five or six knots. Small ice-floes are continually drifting past in the water, and as one of these arrived at the top of the ice-foot, it would be boarded by a crowd of penguins, sometimes until it could hold no more. (Fig. 39.) This "excursion boat," as we used to call it, would float its many occupants down the whole length of the ice-foot, and if it passed close to the edge, those that rode on the floes would shout at the knots of penguins gathered along the ice-foot (Fig. 40) who would shout at them in reply, so that a gay bantering seemed to accompany their passage past the rookery.