_CHAPTER I_
A MOST UNUSUAL POST OFFICE
Nobody thought, not even John Dolittle himself, when the Swallow Mail
was first started, what a tremendous system it would finally grow into
and what a lot of happenings and ideas would come about through it.
Of course such an entirely new thing as this required a great deal
of learning and working out before it could be made to run smoothly.
Something new, some fresh problem, cropped up every day. But although
the Doctor, at all times a busy man, was positively worked to death,
he found it all so interesting that he didn't mind. But the motherly
Dab-Dab was dreadfully worried about him; for indeed at the beginning
he seemed never to sleep at all.
Certainly in the whole history of the world there never was another
post office like the Doctor's. For one thing, it was a houseboat post
office; for another, tea was served to everybody--the clerks and the
customers as well--regularly at four o'clock every afternoon, with
cucumber sandwiches on Sundays. Paddling over to the Foreign Mails
post office for afternoon tea became quite the fashionable thing to do
among the more up-to-date Fantippans. A large awning was put over the
back entrance, forming a pleasant sort of veranda with a good view of
the ocean and the bay. And if you dropped in for a stamp around four
o'clock, as likely as not you would meet the King there, and all the
other high notables of Fantippo, sipping tea.
[Illustration: "The houseboat post office of No-Man's-Land"]
Another thing in which the Doctor's post office was peculiar was its
pens. Most post offices, the Doctor had found, always had abominably
bad pens that spluttered and scratched and wouldn't write. In fact
very many post offices even nowadays seem to pride themselves on their
bad pens. But the Doctor saw to it that _his_ pens were of the very
best quality. Of course, in those times there were no steel pens.
Only quills were used. And John Dolittle got the albatrosses and the
seagulls to keep for him their tail feathers which fell out in the
moulting season. And of course, with such a lot of quills to choose
from, it was easy to have the best pens in the post office.
Still another thing in which the Doctor's post office was different
from all others was the gum used on the stamps. The supply of gum which
the King had been using for his stamps ran short and the Doctor had to
set about discovering and making a new kind. And after a good deal of
experiment he invented a gum made of licorice, which dried quickly and
worked very well. But, as I have said, the Fantippans were very fond of
sweetmeats. And soon after the new gum was put into use the post office
was crowded with people buying stamps by the hundred.
At first the Doctor could not understand this sudden new rush of
business--which kept Too-Too, the cashier, working overtime every
night, adding up the day's takings. The post office safe could hardly
hold all the money taken in and the overflow had to be put in a vase on
the kitchen mantelpiece.
But presently the Doctor noticed that after they had licked the gum off
the stamps, the customers would bring them back and want to exchange
them for money again. Now, it is a rule that all post offices have to
exchange their own stamps, when asked, for the price paid for them. So
long as they are not torn or marked it doesn't matter whether the gum
has been licked off or not. So the Doctor saw that he would have to
change his kind of gum if he wanted to keep stamps that would stick.
And one day the King's brother came to the post office with a terrible
cough and asked him in the same breath (or gasp) to give him five
half-penny stamps and a cure for a cough. This gave the Doctor an
idea. And the next gum which he invented for his stamps he called
_whooping-cough gum_. He made it out of a special kind of sweet, sticky
cough-mixture. He also invented a _bronchitis gum_, a _mumps gum_ and
several others. And whenever there was a catching disease in the town
the Doctor would see that the proper kind of gum to cure it was issued
on the stamps. It saved him a lot of trouble, because the people were
always bothering him to cure colds and sore throats and things. And
he was the first Postmaster General to use this way of getting rid of
sickness--by serving round pleasant medicine on the backs of stamps. He
called it _stamping out_ an epidemic.
One evening at six o'clock Jip shut the doors of the post office as
usual, and hung up the sign "_Closed_" as he always did at that hour.
The Doctor heard the bolts being shot and he stopped counting postcards
and took out his pipe to have a smoke.
[Illustration: "Jip hung up the sign"]
The first hard work of getting the post office in full swing was now
over. And that night John Dolittle felt when he heard the doors being
shut that at last he could afford to keep more regular hours and not
be working all the time. And when Jip came inside the Registered Mail
booth he found the Doctor leaning back in a chair with his feet on the
desk, gazing around him with great satisfaction.
"Well, Jip," said he with a sigh, "we now have a real working post
office."
"Yes," said Jip, putting down his watchman's lantern, "and a mighty
good one it is, too. There isn't another like it anywhere."
"You know," said John Dolittle, "although we opened more than a week
ago I haven't myself written a single letter yet. Fancy living in a
post office for a week and never writing a letter! Look at that drawer
there. Ordinarily the sight of so many stamps would make me write
dozens of letters. All my life I never had a stamp when I really wanted
to write a letter. And--funny thing!--now that I'm living and sleeping
in a post office I can't think of a single person to write to."
"It's a shame," said Jip. "And you with such beautiful handwriting
too--as well as a drawerful of stamps! Never mind; think of all the
animals that are waiting to hear from you."
"Of course, there's Sarah," the Doctor went on puffing at his pipe
dreamily. "Poor dear Sarah! I wonder whom she married. But there you
are, I haven't her address. So I can't write to Sarah. And I don't
suppose any of my old patients would want to hear from me."
"I know!" cried Jip, "write to the Cats'-Meat-Man."
"He can't read," said the Doctor gloomily.
"No, but his wife can," said Jip.
"That's true," murmured the Doctor. "But what shall I write to him
about?"
Just at that moment Speedy-the-Skimmer came in and said:
"Doctor, we've got to do something about the city deliveries in
Fantippo. My post-birds are not very good at finding the right houses
to deliver the letters. You see we swallows, although we nest in
houses, are not regular city birds. We pick out lonely houses as a
rule--in the country. City streets are a bit difficult for swallows to
find their way round in. Some of the post-birds have brought back the
letters they took out this morning to deliver, saying they can't find
the houses they are addressed to."
"Humph!" said the Doctor. "That's too bad. Let me think a minute. Oh, I
know I'll send for Cheapside."
"Who is Cheapside?" asked Speedy.
"Cheapside is a London sparrow," said the Doctor, "who visits me every
summer in Puddleby. The rest of the year he lives around St. Paul's
Cathedral. He builds his nest in St. Edmund's left ear."
"_Where?_" cried Jip.
"In the left ear of a statue of St. Edmund on the outside of the
chancel--the cathedral, you know," the Doctor explained. "Cheapside's
the very fellow we want for city deliveries. There's nothing about
houses and towns he doesn't know. I'll send for him right away."
"I'm afraid," said Speedy, "that a post-bird--unless he was a city bird
himself--would have a hard job finding a sparrow in London. It's an
awful big city, isn't it?"
"Yes, that's so," said John Dolittle.
"Listen, Doctor," said Jip. "You were wondering just now what to write
the Cats'-Meat-Man about. Let Speedy write the letter to Cheapside in
bird scribble and you inclose it in a letter to the Cats'-Meat-Man.
Then when the sparrow comes to Puddleby for his summer visit the
Cats'-Meat-Man can give it to him."
"Splendid!" cried the Doctor. And he snatched a piece of paper off the
desk and started to write.
"And you might ask him too," put in Dab-Dab who had been listening, "to
take a look at the back windows of the house to see that none of them
is broken. We don't want the rain coming in on the beds."
"All right," said the Doctor. "I'll mention that."
So the Doctor's letter was written and addressed to _Matthew Mugg,
Esquire, Cats' Meat Merchant, Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, Slopshire,
England_. And it was sent off by Quip-the-Carrier.
The Doctor did not expect an answer to it right away because the
Cats'-Meat-Man's wife was a very slow reader and a still slower writer.
And anyhow, Cheapside could not be expected to visit Puddleby for
another week yet. He always stayed in London until after the Easter
Bank Holiday. His wife refused to let him leave for the country till
the spring family had been taught by their father how to find the
houses where people threw out crumbs; how to pick up oats from under
the cab horses' nose bags without being stamped on by the horses'
hoofs; how to get about in the trafficky streets of London and a whole
lot of other things that young city birds have to know.
In the meantime, while Quip was gone, life went forward busily and
happily at the Doctor's post office. The animals, Too-Too, Dab-Dab,
Gub-Gub, the pushmi-pullyu, the white mouse and Jip all agreed that
they found living in a houseboat post office great fun. Whenever they
got tired of their floating home they would go off for picnic parties
to the Island of No-Man's-Land, which was now more often called by the
name John Dolittle had given it, "the Animals' Paradise."
On these trips too, the Doctor sometimes accompanied them. He was glad
to, because he so got an opportunity of talking with the many different
kinds of animals there about the signs they were in the habit of using.
And on these signs, which he carefully put down in notebooks, he built
up a sort of written language for animals to use--or _animal scribble_,
as he called it--the same as he had done with the birds.
[Illustration: "He held scribbling classes for the animals"]
Whenever he could spare the time he held afternoon scribbling classes
for the animals in the Great Hollow. And they were very well attended.
He found the monkeys, of course, the easiest to teach and, because
they were so clever, he made some of them into assistant teachers. But
the zebras were quite bright too. The Doctor discovered that these
intelligent beasts had ways of marking and twisting the grasses to show
where they had smelled lions about--though, happily, they did not have
to use this trick in the Animals' Paradise but had brought it with them
when they had swum across from the mainland of Africa.
The Doctor's pets found it quite thrilling to go through the mail
that arrived each day to see if there were any letters for them.
At the beginning of course there wasn't much. But one day Quip had
returned from Puddleby with an answer to the Doctor's letter to the
Cats'-Meat-Man. Mr. Matthew Mugg had written (through his wife) that he
had hung the letter for Cheapside on an apple tree in the garden where
the sparrow would surely see it when he arrived. The windows of the
house were all right, he wrote; but the back door could do with a coat
of paint.
And while Quip had been waiting for this letter to be written he had
filled in the time at Puddleby by gossiping with all the starlings and
blackbirds in the Doctor's garden about the wonderful new Animals' post
office on the island of No-Man's-Land. And pretty soon every creature
in and around Puddleby had got to hear of it.
After that, of course, letters began to arrive at the houseboat for the
Doctor's pets. And one morning, when the mail was sorted, there was a
letter for Dab-Dab from her sister; one for the white mouse written by
a cousin from the Doctor's bureau drawer; one for Jip from the collie
who lived next door in Puddleby and one for Too-Too, telling him he had
a new family of six young ones in the rafters of the stable. But there
was nothing for Gub-Gub. The poor pig was nearly in tears at being left
out. And when the Doctor went into town that afternoon Gub-Gub asked
could he come along.
The next day the post-birds complained that the mail was an extra heavy
one. And when it was sorted, there were ten thick letters for Gub-Gub
and none for anybody else. Jip got suspicious about this and looked
over Gub-Gub's shoulder while he opened them. In each one there was a
banana skin.
"Who sent you those?" asked Jip.
"I sent them to myself," said Gub-Gub, "from Fantippo yesterday. I
don't see why you fellows should get all the mail. Nobody writes to me,
so I write to myself."
_CHAPTER II_
CHEAPSIDE
It was a great day at the Doctor's post office when Cheapside, the
London sparrow, arrived from Puddleby to look after the city deliveries
for Fantippo.
The Doctor was eating his lunch of sandwiches at the information desk
when the little bird popped his head through the window and said in his
cheeky Cockney voice:
"'Ulloa, Doctor, 'ere we are again! What ho! The old firm! Who would
'ave thought you'd come to this?"
Cheapside was a character. Anyone on seeing him for the first time
would probably guess that he spent his life in city streets. His whole
expression was different from other birds. In Speedy's eyes, for
instance--though nobody would dream of thinking him stupid--there was
an almost noble look of country honesty. But in the eyes of Cheapside,
the London Sparrow, there was a saucy, dare-devil expression that
seemed to say "Don't you think for one moment that you'll ever get the
better of me. I'm a Cockney bird."
[Illustration: "Cheapside, the London sparrow"]
"Why, Cheapside!" cried John Dolittle. "At last you've come. My, but
it's good to see you! Did you have a pleasant journey?"
"Not bad--not 'alf bad," said Cheapside, eyeing some crumbs from the
Doctor's lunch which lay upon the desk. "No storms. Pretty decent
travellin'. 'Ot? Well, I should say it _was_ 'ot. 'Ot enough for an
'Ottentot!... Quaint place you 'ave 'ere--sort of a barge?"
By this time all the animals had heard Cheapside arriving and they came
rushing in to see the traveler and to hear the news of Puddleby and
England.
"How is the old horse in the stable?" asked John Dolittle.
"Pretty spry," said Cheapside. "Course 'e ain't as young as 'e used to
be. But 'e's lively enough for an old 'un. 'E asked me to bring you a
bunch of crimson ramblers--just bloomin' over the stable door, they
was. But I says to 'im, I says, 'What d'yer take me for, an omnibus?'
Fancy a feller at my time of life carrying a bunch of roses all the way
down the Atlantic! Folks would think I was goin' to a weddin' at the
South Pole."
"Gracious, Cheapside!" said the Doctor, laughing. "It makes me quite
homesick for England to hear your Cockney chirp."
"And me, too," sighed Jip. "Were there many rats in the woodshed,
Cheapside?"
"'Undreds of them," said the sparrow--"as big as rabbits. And that
uppish you'd think they owned the place!"
"I'll soon settle _them_, when I get back," said Jip. "I hope we go
soon."
"How does the garden look, Cheapside?" asked the Doctor.
"A1," said the sparrow. "Weeds in the paths, o' course. But the iris
under the kitchen window looked something lovely, they did."
"Anything new in London?" asked the white mouse who was also city bred.
"Yes," said Cheapside. "There's always something doing in good
old London. They've got a new kind of cab that goes on two wheels
instead of four. A man called 'Ansom invented it. Much faster than
the old 'ackneys they are. You see 'em everywhere. And there's a new
greengrocer's shop near the Royal Exchange."
"I'm going to have a greengrocer's shop of my own when I grow up,"
murmured Gub-Gub, "--in England where they grow good vegetables--I'm
awfully tired of Africa--and then I'll watch the new vegetables coming
into season all the year round."
"He's always talking about that," said Too-Too. "Such an ambition in
life to have--to run a greengrocer's shop!"
"Ah, England!" cried Gub-Gub sentimentally. "What is there more
beautiful in life than the heart of a young lettuce in the Spring?"
"'Ark at 'im," said Cheapside, raising his eyebrows. "Ain't 'e the
poetical porker? Why don't you write a bunch of sonnets to the
Skunk-Kissed-Cabbages of Louisiana, Mr. Bacon?"
"Well, now, look here, Cheapside," said the Doctor. "We want you to get
these city deliveries straightened out for us in the town of Fantippo.
Our post birds are having great difficulty finding the right houses to
take letters to. You're a city-bird, born and bred. Do you think you
can help us?"
"I'll see what I can do for you, Doc," said the Sparrow, "after I've
taken a look around this 'eathen town of yours. But first I want a
bath. I'm all heat up from flying under a broiling sun. Ain't you got
no puddles round here for a bird to take a bath in?"
"No, this isn't puddly climate," said the Doctor. "You're not in
England, you know. But I'll bring you my shaving mug and you can take a
bath in that."
"Mind, you wash the soap out first, Doc," chirped the Sparrow, "it gets
into my eyes."
The next day after Cheapside had had a good sleep to rest up from his
long journey the Doctor took the London sparrow to show him around the
town of Fantippo.
"Well, Doc," said Cheapside after they had seen the sights, "as a
town I don't think much of it--really, I don't. It's big. I'll say
that for it. I 'ad no idea they 'ad towns as big as this in Africa.
But the streets is so narrow! I can see why they don't 'ave no cabs
'ere--'ardly room for a goat to pass, let alone a four-wheeler. And as
for the 'ouses, they seem to be made of the insides of old mattresses.
The first thing we'll 'ave to do is to make old King Cocoanut tell 'is
subjects to put door knockers on their doors. What is 'ome without a
door knocker, I'd like to know? Of course, your postmen can't deliver
the letters, when they've no knockers to knock with."
"I'll attend to that," said the Doctor. "I'll see the King about it
this afternoon."
"And then, they've got no letter boxes in the doors," said Cheapside.
"There ought to be slots made to poke the letters in. The only place
these bloomin' 'eathens have for a postman to put a letter is down the
chimney."
"Very well," said the Doctor. "I'll attend to that, too. Shall I have
the letter boxes in the middle of the door, or would you like them on
one side?"
"Put 'em on each side of the doors--two to every 'ouse," said Cheapside.
"What's that for?" asked the Doctor.
"That's a little idea of my own," said the Sparrow. "We'll 'ave one
box for the bills and one for sure-enough letters. You see, people
are so disappointed when they 'ear the postman's knock and come to
the door, expecting to find a nice letter from a friend or news that
money's been left them and all they get is a bill from the tailor.
But if we have two boxes on each door, one marked '_Bills_,' and the
other '_Letters_,' the postman can put all the bills in one box and the
honest letters in the other. As I said, it's a little idea of my own.
We might as well be real up-to-date. What do you think of it?"
"I think it's a splendid notion," said the Doctor. "Then the people
need only have one disappointment--when they clear the bill box on the
day set for paying their debts."
"That's the idea," said Cheapside. "And tell the post-birds--as soon
as we've got the knockers on--to knock once for a bill and twice for
a letter, so the folks in the 'ouse will know whether to come and get
the mail or not. Oh, I tell you, we'll show these poor pagans a thing
or two before we're finished! We'll 'ave a post office in Fantipsy
that really is a post office. And, now, 'ow about the Christmas boxes,
Doctor? Postmen always expect a handsome present around Christmas time,
you know."
"Well, I'm rather afraid," said the Doctor doubtfully, "that these
people don't celebrate Christmas as a holiday."
"_Don't celebrate Christmas!_" cried Cheapside in a shocked voice.
"What a disgraceful scandal! Well, look here, Doctor. You just tell
King Cocoa-butter that if 'e and 'is people don't celebrate the festive
season by giving us post-birds Christmas-boxes there ain't going to
be no mail delivered in Fantipsy from New Year's to Easter. And you
can tell 'im I said so. It's 'igh time somebody hen-lightened 'is
hignorance."
"All right," said the Doctor, "I'll attend to that, too."
"Tell 'im," said Cheapside, "we'll expect two lumps of sugar on every
doorstep Christmas morning for the post-birds. No sugar, no letters!"
That afternoon the Doctor called upon the King and explained to him
the various things that Cheapside wanted. And His Majesty gave in
to them, every one. Beautiful brass knockers were screwed on all
the doors--light ones, which the birds could easily lift. And very
elegant they looked--by far the most up-to-date part of the ramshackle
dwellings. The double boxes were also put up, with one place for bills
and one for the letters.
[Illustration: "The double letter boxes of Fantippo"]
John Dolittle instructed King Koko as well in the meaning of Christmas
time, which should be a season for giving gifts. And among the
Fantippo people the custom of making presents at Christmas became very
general--not only to postmen, but to friends and relatives, too.
That is why when, several years after the Doctor had left this country,
some missionaries visited that part of Africa, they found to their
astonishment that Christmas was celebrated there, although the people
were heathens. But they never learned that the custom had been brought
about by Cheapside, the cheeky London sparrow.
And now very soon Cheapside took entire charge of the city delivery of
mails in Fantippo. Of course, as soon as the mail began to get heavy,
when the people got the habit of writing more to their friends and
relatives, Cheapside could not deal with all the mail himself. So he
sent a message by a swallow to get fifty sparrows from the streets of
London (who were, like himself, accustomed to city ways), to help him
with the delivery of letters. And around the native holiday seasons,
the Harvest Moon and the Coming of the Rains, he had to send for fifty
more to deal with the extra mail.
And if you happened to pass down the main street of Fantippo at nine in
the morning or four in the afternoon you would hear the _Rat-tat-tat_
of the post-sparrows, knocking on the doors--_Tat-tat_, if it was a
real letter, and just _Rat!_ if it was a bill.
Of course, they could not carry more than one or two letters at a
time--being such small birds. But it only took them a moment to fly
back to the houseboat for another load, where Too-Too was waiting for
them at the "city" window with piles of mail, sorted out into boxes
marked "_Central_," "_West Central_," "_Southwest_," etc., for the
different parts of the town. This was another idea of Cheapside's, to
divide up the city into districts, the same as they did in London,
so the mail could be delivered quickly without too much hunting for
streets.
Cheapside's help was, indeed, most valuable to the Doctor. The King
himself said that the mails were wonderfully managed. The letters were
brought regularly and never left at the wrong house.
He had only one fault, had Cheapside. And that was being cheeky.
Whenever he got into an argument his Cockney swearing was just
dreadful. And in spite of the Doctor's having issued orders time and
time again that he expected his post office clerks and mail birds to
be strictly polite to the public, Cheapside was always getting into
rows--which he usually started himself.
One day when King Koko's pet white peacock came to the Doctor and
complained that the Cockney sparrow had made faces at him over the
palace wall the Doctor became quite angry and read the City Manager a
long lecture.
[Illustration: "The royal peacock complained that Cheapside had made
faces at him"]
Then Cheapside got together a gang of his tough London sparrow friends
and one night they flew into the palace garden and mobbed the white
peacock and pulled three feathers out of his beautiful tail.
This last piece of rowdyism was too much for John Dolittle and, calling
up Cheapside, he discharged him on the spot--though he was very sorry
to do it.
But when the sparrow went all his London friends went with him and
the post office was left with no city birds to attend to the city
deliveries. The swallows and other birds tried their hardest to get
letters around to the houses properly. But they couldn't. And before
long complaints began to come in from the townspeople.
Then the Doctor was sorry and wished he hadn't discharged Cheapside,
who seemed to be the only one who could manage this part of the mails
properly.
But one day, to the Doctor's great delight--though he tried hard to
look angry--Cheapside strolled into the post office with a straw in the
corner of his mouth, looking as though nothing had happened.
John Dolittle had thought that he and his friends had gone home to
London. But they hadn't. They knew the Doctor would need them and they
had just hung around outside the town. And then the Doctor, after
lecturing Cheapside again about politeness, gave him back his job.
But the next day the rowdy little sparrow threw a bottle of post office
ink over the royal white peacock when he came to the houseboat with the
King to take tea. Then the Doctor discharged Cheapside again.
In fact, the Doctor used to discharge him for rudeness regularly about
once a month. And the city mails always got tied up soon after. But, to
the Doctor's great relief, the City Manager always came back just when
the tie-up was at its worst and put things right again.
Cheapside was a wonderful bird. But it seemed as though he just
couldn't go a whole month without being rude to somebody. The Doctor
said it was in his nature.
_CHAPTER III_
THE BIRDS THAT HELPED COLUMBUS
After the Doctor had written his first letter by Swallow Mail to the
Cats'-Meat-Man he began to think of all the other people to whom he
had neglected to write for years and years. And very soon every spare
moment he had was filled in writing to friends and acquaintances
everywhere.
And then, of course, there were the letters he sent to and received
from birds and animals all over the world. First he wrote to the
various bird leaders who were in charge of the branch offices at
Cape Horn, Thibet, Tahiti, Kashmir, Christmas Island, Greenland and
Puddleby-on-the-Marsh. To them he gave careful instructions how
the branch post offices were to be run--always insisting on strict
politeness from the post office clerks; and he answered all the
questions that the branch postmasters wrote asking for guidance.
And he sent letters to various fellow naturalists whom he knew in
different countries and gave them a whole lot of information about the
yearly flights or migration of birds. Because, of course, in the bird
mail business he learned a great deal on that subject that had never
been known to naturalists before.
Outside the post office he had a notice board set up on which were
posted the Outgoing and Incoming Mails. The notices would read
something like this:
_Next Wednesday, July 18, the Red-Winged Plovers will leave this
office for Denmark and points on the Skager Rack. Post your mail
early, please. All letters should bear a four-penny stamp. Small
packages will also be carried on this flight for Morocco, Portugal
and the Channel Islands._
Whenever a new flight of birds were expected at No-Man's-Land the
Doctor always had a big supply of food of their particular kind got
ready for their arrival before-hand. He had at the big meeting with the
leaders put down in his notebook the dates of all the yearly flights of
the different kinds of birds, where they started from and where they
went to. And this notebook was kept with great care.
One day Speedy was sitting on top of the weighing scales while the
Doctor was sorting a large pile of outgoing letters. Suddenly the
Skimmer cried out:
"Great heavens, Doctor, I've gained an ounce! I'll never be able to fly
in the races again. Look, it says four and a half ounces!"
[Illustration: "'Great heavens, Doctor, I've gained an ounce!'"]
"No, Speedy," said the Doctor. "See, you have an ounce weight on the
pan as well as yourself. That makes you only three and a half ounces."
"Oh," said the Skimmer, "is that the trouble? I was never good at
arithmetic. What a relief! Thank goodness, I haven't gained!"
"Listen, Speedy," said the Doctor, "in this batch of mail we have a lot
of letters for Panama. What mails have we got going out to-morrow?"
"I'm not sure," said Speedy. "I'll go and look at the notice board. I
think it's the Golden Jays.... Yes," he said, coming back in a moment,
"that's right, the Golden Jays to-morrow, Tuesday, the 15th, weather
permitting."
"Where are they bound for, Speedy?" asked the Doctor. "My notebook's in
the safe."
"From Dahomey to Venezuela," said Speedy, raising his right foot to
smother a yawn.
"Good," said John Dolittle. "Then they can take these Panama letters
for me. It won't be much out of their way. What do Golden Jays eat?"
"They are very fond of acorns," said Speedy.
"All right," said the Doctor. "Please tell Gub-Gub for me to go across
to the island and get the wild boars to gather up a couple of sacks of
acorns. I want all the birds who work for us to have a good feed before
they leave the Main Office for their flights."
The next morning when the Doctor woke up he heard a tremendous
chattering all around the post office and he knew that the Golden Jays
had arrived overnight. And after he had dressed and come out on to the
veranda, there, sure enough, they were--myriads of very handsome gold
and black birds, swarming everywhere, gossiping away at a great rate
and gobbling up the acorns laid out for them in bushels.
The leader, who already knew the Doctor, of course, came forward to get
orders and to see how much mail there was to be carried.
After everything had been arranged and the leader had decided he
need expect no tornadoes or bad weather for the next twenty-four
hours, he gave a command. Then all the birds rose in the air to fly
away--whistling farewell to Postmaster General Dolittle and the Head
Office.
"Oh, by the way, Doctor," said the leader, turning back a moment, "did
you ever hear of a man called Christopher Columbus?"
"Oh, surely," said the Doctor. "He discovered America in 1492."
"Well, I just wanted to tell you," said the Jay, "that if it hadn't
been for an ancestor of mine he wouldn't have discovered it in
1492--later perhaps, but not in 1492."
"Oh, indeed!" said John Dolittle. "Tell me more about it." And he
pulled a notebook out of his pocket and started to write.
"Well," said the Jay, "the story was handed down to me by my mother,
who heard it from my grandmother, who got it from my great-grandmother,
and so on, way back to an ancestor of ours who lived in America in the
fifteenth century. Our kind of birds in those days did not come across
to this side of the Atlantic, neither summer nor winter. We used to
spend from March to September in the Bermudas and the rest of the year
in Venezuela. And when we made the autumn journey south we used to stop
at the Bahama Islands to rest on the way.
"The fall of the year 1492 was a stormy season. Gales and squalls
were blowing up all the time and we did not get started on our trip
until the second week in October. My ancestor had been the leader of
the flock for a long time. But he had grown sort of old and feeble
and a younger bird was elected in his place to lead the Golden Jays
to Venezuela that year. The new leader was a conceited youngster,
and because he had been chosen he thought he knew everything about
navigation and weather and sea crossings.
"Shortly after the birds started they sighted, to their great
astonishment, a number of boats sailing on a westward course. This was
about half way between the Bermudas and the Bahamas. The ships were
much larger than anything they had ever seen before. All they had been
accustomed to up to that time were little canoes, with Indians in them.
"The new leader immediately got scared and gave the order for the Jays
to swing in further toward the land, so they wouldn't be seen by the
men who crowded these large boats. He was a superstitious leader and
anything he didn't understand he kept away from. But my ancestor did
not go with the flock, but made straight for the ships.
"He was gone about twenty minutes, and presently he flew after the
other birds and said to the new leader: 'Over there in those ships a
brave man is in great danger. They come from Europe, seeking land.
The sailors, not knowing how near they are to sighting it, have
mutinied against their admiral. I am an old bird and I know this brave
sea-farer. Once when I was making a crossing--the first I ever made--a
gale came up and I was separated from my fellows. For three days I
had to fly with the battering wind. And finally I was blown eastward
near the Old World. Just when I was ready to drop into the sea from
exhaustion I spied a ship. I simply had to rest. I was weather-beaten
and starving. So I made for the boat and fell half dead upon the
deck. The sailors were going to put me in a cage. But the captain of
the ship--this same navigator whose life is now threatened by his
rebellious crew in those ships over there--fed me crumbs and nursed
me back to life. Then he let me go free, to fly to Venezuela when the
weather was fair. We are land birds. Let us now save this good man's
life by going to his ship and showing ourselves to his sailors. They
will then know that land is near and be obedient to their captain."
"Yes, yes," said the Doctor. "Go on. I remember Columbus writing of
land birds in his diary. Go on."
"So," said the Jay, "the whole flock turned and made for Columbus's
fleet. They were only just in time. For the sailors were ready to kill
their admiral, who, they said, had brought them on a fool's errand to
find land where there was none. He must turn back and sail for Spain,
they said, or be killed.
[Illustration: "'The sailors were ready to kill their admiral'"]
"But when the sailors saw a great flock of land birds passing over the
ship going southwest instead of west, they took new heart, for they
were sure land must lie not far to the southwestward.
"So we led them on to the Bahamas. And on the seventh day, very early
in the morning, the crew, with a cry of 'Land! Land!' fell down upon
their knees and gave thanks to heaven. Watling's Island, one of the
smaller Bahamas, lay ahead of them, smiling in the sea.
"Then the sailors gathered about the admiral, Christopher Columbus,
whom a little before they were going to kill, and cheered and called
him the greatest navigator in the world--which, in truth, he was.
"But even Columbus himself never learned to his dying day that it was
the weather-beaten bird who had fallen on his friendly deck some years
before, who had led him by the shortest cut to the land of the New
World.
"So you see, Doctor," the Jay ended, picking up his letters and getting
ready to fly, "if it hadn't been for my ancestor Christopher Columbus
would have had to turn back to please his sailors, or be killed. If
it hadn't been for him America would not have been discovered in
1492--later, perhaps, but not in 1492. Good-bye! I must be going.
Thanks for the acorns."
_CHAPTER IV_
CAPE STEPHEN LIGHT
On the coast of West Africa, about twenty miles to the northward
of Fantippo, there was a cape running out into the sea which had a
lighthouse on it called the Cape Stephen Light. This light was kept
carefully burning by the government who controlled that part of Africa,
in order that ships should see it from the sea and know where they
were. It was a dangerous part of the coast, this. There were many rocks
and shallows near the end of Cape Stephen. And if the light were ever
allowed to go out at night, of course, ships traveling that part of the
sea would be in great danger of running into the long cape and wrecking
themselves.
[Illustration: "There were many rocks and shallows near the end of Cape
Stephen"]
Now, one evening not long after the Golden Jays had gone west, the
Doctor was writing letters in the post office by the light of a candle.
It was late and all the animals were fast asleep long ago. Presently
while he wrote he heard a sound a long way off, coming through the open
window at his elbow. He put down his pen and listened.
It was the sound of a seabird, calling away out at sea. Now, seabirds
don't, as a rule, call very much unless they are in great numbers. This
call sounded like a single bird. The Doctor put his head through the
window and looked out.
It was a dark night, as black as pitch, and he couldn't see a
thing--especially as his eyes were used to the light of the candle. The
mysterious call was repeated again and again, like a cry of distress
from the sea. The Doctor didn't know quite what to make of it. But soon
he thought it seemed to be coming nearer. And, grabbing his hat, he ran
out on to the veranda.
"What is it? What's the matter?" he shouted into the darkness over the
sea.
He got no answer. But soon, with a rush of wings that nearly blew his
candle out, a great seagull swept down on to the houseboat rail beside
him.
"Doctor," panted the gull, "the Cape Stephen Light is out. I don't
know what's the matter. It has never gone out before. We use it as a
land-mark, you know, when we are flying after dark. The night's as
black as ink. I'm afraid some ship will surely run into the cape. I
thought I'd come and tell you."
"Good heavens!" cried the Doctor. "What can have happened? There's a
lighthouse keeper living there to attend to it. Was it lighted earlier
in the evening?"
"I don't know," said the gull. "I was coming in from catching
herring--they're running just now, you know, a little to the North.
And, expecting to see the light, I lost my way and flew miles too far
south. When I found out my mistake I went back, flying close down by
the shore. And I came to Stephen Cape, but it had no light. It was
black as anything. And I would have run right into the rocks myself if
I hadn't been going carefully."
"How far would it be from here?" asked John Dolittle.
"Well, by land it would be twenty-five miles to where the lighthouse
stands," said the gull. "But by water it would be only about twelve, I
should say."
"All right," said the Doctor, hurrying into his coat. "Wait just a
moment till I wake Dab-Dab."
The Doctor ran into the post office kitchen and woke the poor
housekeeper, who was slumbering soundly beside the kitchen stove.
"Listen, Dab-Dab!" said the Doctor, shaking her. "Wake up! The Cape
Stephen Light's gone out!"
"Whazhat?" said Dab-Dab, sleepily opening her eyes. "Stove's gone out?"
"No, the lighthouse on Cape Stephen," said the Doctor. "A gull just
came and told me. The shipping's in danger. Wrecks, you know, and all
that. Wake up and look sensible, for pity's sake!"
At last poor Dab-Dab, fully awakened, understood what was the matter.
And in a moment she was up and doing.
"I know where it is, Doctor. I'll fly right over there.--No, I won't
need the gull to guide me. You keep him to show you the way. Follow me
immediately in the canoe. If I can find out anything I'll come back and
meet you half way. If not, I'll wait for you by the lighthouse tower.
Thank goodness, it's a calm night, anyway--even if it is dark!"
With a flap of her wings, Dab-Dab flew right through the open window
and was gone into the night, while the Doctor grabbed his little black
medicine bag and, calling to the gull to follow him, ran down to the
other end of the houseboat, untied the canoe and jumped in. Then he
pushed off, headed around the island of No-Man's-Land and paddled for
all he was worth for the seaward end of Cape Stephen.
About half way to the long neck of land that jutted out into the gloomy
ocean the Doctor's canoe was met by Dab-Dab--though how she found it in
the darkness, with only the sound of the paddle to guide her, goodness
only knows.
"Doctor," said she, "if the lighthouse keeper is in there at all he
must be sick, or something. I hammered on the windows, but nobody
answered."
"Dear me!" muttered the Doctor, paddling harder than ever, "I wonder
what can have happened?"
"And that's not the worst," said Dab-Dab. "On the far side of the
cape--you can't see it from here--there's the headlight of a big
sailing ship, bearing down southward, making straight for the rocks.
They can't see the lighthouse and they don't know what danger they're
in."
"Good Lord!" groaned the Doctor, and he nearly broke the paddle as he
churned the water astern to make the canoe go faster yet.
"How far off the rocks is the ship now?" asked the gull.
"About a mile, I should say," said Dab-Dab. "But she's a big
one--judging by the height of her mast-light--and she won't be long
before she's aground on the cape."
"Keep right on, Doctor," said the gull. "I'm going off to get some
friends of mine."
And the seagull spread his wings and flew away toward the land, calling
the same cry as the Doctor had heard through the post office window.
John Dolittle had no idea of what he meant to do. Nor was the gull
himself sure that he would be in time to succeed with the plan he had
in mind. But presently, to his delight, the seabird heard his call
being answered from the rocky shores shrouded in darkness. And soon he
had hundreds of his brother gulls circling round him in the night.
Then he took them to the great ship, which was sailing calmly onward
toward the rocks and destruction. And there, going forward to where the
helmsman held the spokes of the wheel and watched the compass swinging
before him in the light of a little, dim lamp, the gulls started
dashing themselves into the wheelman's face and covering the glass of
the compass, so he could not steer the ship.
[Illustration: "The gulls dashed themselves into the wheelman's face"]
The helmsman, battling with the birds, set up a yell for help, saying
he couldn't see to steer the boat. Then the officers and sailors rushed
up to his assistance and tried to beat the birds off.
In the meantime the Doctor, in his canoe, had reached the end of Cape
Stephen and, springing ashore, he scrambled up the rocks to where the
great tower of the lighthouse rose skyward over the black, unlighted
sea. Feeling and fumbling, he found the door and hammered on it,
yelling to be let in. But no one answered him. And Dab-Dab whispered
in a hoarse voice that the light of the ship was nearer now--less than
half a mile from the rocks.
Then the Doctor drew back for a run and threw his whole weight against
the door. But the hinges and lock had been made to stand the beating of
the sea and they budged no more than if he had been a fly.
At last, with a roar of rage, the Doctor grabbed up a rock from the
ground as big as a chair and banged it with all his might against the
lock of the lighthouse door. With a crash the door flew open and the
Doctor sprang within.
On the ship the seamen were still fighting with the gulls. The captain,
seeing that no helmsman could steer the boat right with thousands of
wings fluttering in his eyes, gave the orders to lay the ship to for a
little and to get out the hose pipes. And a strong stream of water was
turned on to the gulls around the helmsman, so they could no longer get
near him. Then the ship got under way again and came on toward the cape
once more.
Inside the lighthouse the Doctor found the darkness blacker still. With
hands outstretched before him, he hurried forward and the first thing
he did was to stumble over a man who was lying on the floor just within
the door. Without waiting to see what was the matter with him, the
Doctor jumped over his body and began to grope his way up the winding
stairs of the tower that led to the big lamp at the top.
Meanwhile Dab-Dab stayed below at the door, looking out over the sea at
the mast light of the ship--which, after a short delay, was now coming
on again toward the rocks. At any minute she expected the great beam of
the lighthouse lamp to flare out over the sea, as soon as the Doctor
should get it lit, to warn the sailors of their danger. But, instead,
she presently heard the Doctor's agonized voice calling from the head
of the stairs:
"Dab-Dab! Dab-Dab! I can't light it. _We forgot to bring matches!_"
"Well, what have you _done_ with the matches, Doctor?" called Dab-Dab.
"They were always in your coat."
"I left them beside my pipe on the information desk," came the Doctor's
voice from the top of the dark stairs. "But there must be matches in
the lighthouse somewhere. We must find them."
"What chance have we of that?" shouted Dab-Dab. "It's as black as black
down here. And the ship is coming nearer every minute."
"Feel in the man's pockets," called John Dolittle. "Hurry!"
In a minute Dab-Dab went through the pockets of the man who lay so
still upon the floor.
"He hasn't any matches on him," she shouted. "Not a single one."
"Confound the luck!" muttered John Dolittle.
And then there was a solemn silence in the lighthouse while the Doctor
above and Dab-Dab below thought gloomily of that big ship sailing
onward to her wreck because they had no matches.
But suddenly out of the black stillness came a small, sweet voice,
singing, somewhere near.
"Dab-Dab!" cried the Doctor in a whisper. "Do you hear that? A
canary! There's a canary singing somewhere--probably in a cage in the
lighthouse kitchen!"
In a moment he was clattering down the stairs.
"Come on," he cried. "We must find the kitchen. That canary will know
where the matches are kept. Find the kitchen!"
Then the two of them went stumbling around in the darkness, feeling
the walls, and presently they came upon a low door, opened it and
fell headlong down a short flight of steps that led to the lighthouse
kitchen. This was a little underground room, like a cellar, cut out of
the rock on which the lighthouse stood. If there was any fire or stove
in it it had long since gone out, for the darkness here was as black as
anywhere else. But as soon as the door had opened, the trills of the
song bird grew louder.
"Tell me," called John Dolittle, in canary language, "where are the
matches? Quick!"
"Oh, at last you've come," said a high, small, polite voice out of
the darkness. "Would you mind putting a cover over my cage? There's a
draught and I can't sleep. Nobody's been near me since midday. I don't
know what can have happened to the keeper. He always covers up my
cage at tea-time. But to-night I wasn't covered at all, so I went on
singing. You'll find my cover up on the----"
"_Matches! Matches!_ Where are the matches?" screamed Dab-Dab. "The
light's out and there's a ship in danger! Where are the matches kept?"
"On the mantelpiece, next to the pepper box," said the canary. "Come
over here to my cage and feel along to your left--high up--and your
hand will fall right on them."
The Doctor sprang across the room, upsetting a chair on his way, and
felt along the wall. His hand touched the corner of a stone shelf and
the next moment Dab-Dab gave a deep sigh of relief, for she heard the
cheerful rattle of a box of matches as the Doctor fumbled to strike a
light.
"You'll find a candle on the table--there--look--behind you," said the
canary, when the match light dimly lit up the kitchen.
With trembling fingers the Doctor lit the candle. Then, shielding the
flame with his hand, he bounded out of the room and up the stairs.
[Illustration: "The Doctor lit the candle"]
"At last!" he muttered. "Let's hope I'm not too late!"
At the head of the kitchen steps he met the seagull coming into the
lighthouse with two companions.
"Doctor," cried the gull, "we held off the ship as long as we could.
But the stupid sailors, not knowing we were trying to save them, turned
hoses on us and we had to give up. The ship is terribly near now."
Without a word the Doctor sped on up the winding steps of the tower.
Round and round he went, upward, till he was ready to drop from
dizziness.
At length reaching the great glass lamp chamber at the top, he set down
his candle and, striking two matches at once he held one in each hand
and lit the big wick in two places.
By this time Dab-Dab had gone outside again and was watching over the
sea for the oncoming ship. And when at last the great light from the
big lamp at the top of the tower suddenly flared out over the sea there
was the bow of the vessel, not more than a hundred yards from the rocky
shore of the cape!
Then came a cry from the look-out, shouted orders from the captain,
much blowing of whistles and ringing of bells. And just in time to save
herself from a watery grave, the big ship swung her nose out to sea and
sailed safely past upon her way.
_CHAPTER V_
GULLS AND SHIPS
The morning sun peeping in at the window of the lighthouse found the
Doctor still working over the keeper where he lay at the foot of the
tower stairs.
"He's coming to," said Dab-Dab. "See, his eyes are beginning to blink."
"Get me some more clean water from the kitchen," said the Doctor, who
was bathing a large lump on the side of the man's head.
Presently the keeper opened his eyes wide and stared up into the
Doctor's face.
"Who?----What?"----he murmured stupidly. "The light!--I must attend
to the light!--I must attend to the light!" and he struggled weakly to
get up.
"It's all right," said the Doctor. "The light has been lit. And it's
nearly day now. Here, drink this. Then you'll feel better."
And the Doctor held some medicine to his lips which he had taken from
the little black bag.
In a short while the man grew strong enough to stand on his feet. Then,
with the Doctor's help, he walked as far as the kitchen, where John
Dolittle and Dab-Dab made him comfortable in an armchair, lit the stove
and cooked his breakfast for him.
[Illustration: "The Doctor and Dab-Dab cooked his breakfast for him"]
"I'm mighty grateful to you, stranger, whoever you be," said the man.
"Usually there's two of us here, me and my partner, Fred. But yesterday
morning I let Fred go off with the ketch to get oysters. That's why I'm
alone. I was coming down the stairs about noon, from putting new wicks
in the lamp, when my foot slipped and I took a tumble to the bottom. My
head fetched up against the wall and knocked the senses right out of
me. How long I lay there before you found me I don't know."
"Well, all's well that ends well," said the Doctor. "Take this; you
must be nearly starved."
And he handed the keeper a large cup of steaming coffee.
About ten o'clock in the morning Fred, the partner, returned in the
little sail-boat from his oyster-gathering expedition. He was very
much worried when he heard of the accident which had happened while he
had been off duty. Fred, like the other keeper, was a Londoner and a
seaman. He was a pleasant fellow and both he and his partner (who was
now almost entirely recovered from his injury) were very glad of the
Doctor's company to break the tiresome dullness of their lonely life.
They took John Dolittle all over the lighthouse to see the workings of
it. And outside they showed him with great pride the tiny garden of
tomatoes and nasturtiums which they had planted near the foot of the
tower.
They only got a holiday once a year, they told John Dolittle, when a
government ship stopped near Cape Stephen and took them back to England
for six weeks' vacation, leaving two other men in their place to take
care of the light while they were gone.
They asked the Doctor if he could give them any news of their beloved
London. But he had to admit that he also had been away from that city
for a long time. However, while they were talking Cheapside came into
the lighthouse kitchen, looking for the Doctor. The city sparrow was
delighted to find that the keepers were also Cockneys. And he gave
them, through the Doctor, all the latest gossip of Wapping, Limehouse,
the East India Docks and the wharves and the shipping of London River.
The two keepers thought that the Doctor was surely crazy when he
started a conversation of chirps with Cheapside. But from the answers
they got to their questions they could see there was no fake about the
news of the city which the sparrow gave.
Cheapside said the faces of those two Cockney seamen were the best
scenery he had looked on since he had come to Africa. And after that
first visit he was always flying over to the lighthouse in his spare
time to see his new friends. Of course, he couldn't talk to them,
because neither of them knew sparrow talk--not even Cockney sparrow
talk. But Cheapside loved being with them, anyway.
"They're such a nice, wholesome, Christian change," he said, "after
these 'ere 'eathen hidolaters. And you should just hear Fred sing 'See
That My Grave's Kept Green.'"
The lighthouse keepers were sorry to have the Doctor go and they
wouldn't let him leave till he promised to come and take dinner with
them next Sunday.
Then, after they had loaded his canoe with a bushel of rosy tomatoes
and a bouquet of nasturtiums, the Doctor, with Dab-Dab and Cheapside,
paddled away for Fantippo, while the keepers waved to them from the
lighthouse door.
The Doctor had not paddled very far on his return journey to the post
office when the seagull who had brought the news of the light overtook
him.
"Everything all right now, Doctor?" he asked as he swept in graceful
circles around the canoe.
"Yes," said John Dolittle, munching a tomato. "The man got an awful
crack on the head from that fall. But he will be all over it in a
little while. If it hadn't been for the canary, though, who told us
where the matches were--and for you, too, holding back the sailors--we
would never have saved that ship."
The Doctor threw a tomato skin out of the canoe and the gull caught it
neatly in the air before it touched the water.
"Well, I'm glad we were in time," said the bird.
"Tell me," asked the Doctor, watching him thoughtfully as he hovered
and swung and curved around the tiny boat, "what made you come and
bring me the news about the light? Gulls don't, as a rule, bother much
about people or what happens to ships, do they?"
"You're mistaken, Doctor," said the gull, catching another skin with
deadly accuracy. "Ships and the men in them are very important to
us--not so much down here in the South. But up North, why, if it wasn't
for the ships in the winter we gulls would often have a hard time
finding enough to eat. You see, after it gets cold fish and sea foods
become sort of scarce. Sometimes we make out by going up the rivers
to towns and hanging about the artificial lakes in parks where fancy
waterfowl are kept. The people come to the parks and throw biscuits
into the lakes for the waterfowl. But if we are around the biscuits get
caught before they hit the lake--like that," and the gull snatched a
third tomato skin on the wing with a lightning lunge.
[Illustration: "The gull caught the tomato skin with a lightning lunge"]
"But you were speaking of ships," said the Doctor.
"Yes," the gull went on--rather indistinctly, because his mouth was
full of tomato skin--"we find ships much better for winter feeding. You
see, it isn't really fair of us to go and bag all the food from the
fancy waterfowl in parks. So we never do it unless we have to. Usually
in winter we stick to the ships. Why, two years ago I and a cousin of
mine lived the whole year round following ships for the food scraps the
stewards threw out into the sea. The rougher the weather, the more food
we get, because then the passengers don't feel like eating and most
of the grub gets thrown out. Yes, I and my cousin attached ourselves,
as it were, to the _Transatlantic Packet Line_, which runs ships
from Glasgow to Philadelphia, and traveled back and forth with them
across the ocean dozens of trips. But later on we changed over to the
_Binnacle Line_--Tilbury to Boston."
"Why?" asked the Doctor.
"We found they ran a better table for their passengers. With the
_Binnacle_, who threw us out morning biscuits, afternoon tea and
sandwiches last thing at night--as well as three square meals a day--we
lived like fighting cocks. It nearly made sailors of us for good. It's
a great life--all you do is eat. I should say gulls are interested in
men and ships, Doctor--very much so. Why, I wouldn't have an accident
happen to a ship for anything--especially a passenger ship."
"Humph! That's very interesting," murmured the Doctor. "And have you
seen many accidents--ships in trouble?"
"Oh, heaps of times," said the gull--"storms, collisions at night,
ships going aground in the fog, and the rest. Oh, yes, I've seen lots
of boats in trouble at sea."
"Ah!" said the Doctor, looking up from his paddling. "See, we are
already back at the post office. And there's the pushmi-pullyu ringing
the lunch bell. We're just in time. I smell liver and bacon--these
tomatoes will go with it splendidly. Won't you come in and join us?" he
asked the gull. "I would like to hear more about your life with ships.
You've given me an idea."
"Thank you," said the gull. "I am feeling kind of peckish myself. You
are very kind. This is the first time I've eaten ship's food _inside_ a
ship."
And when the canoe was tied up they went into the houseboat and sat
down to lunch at the kitchen table.
"Well, now," said the Doctor to the gull as soon as they were seated,
"you were speaking of fogs. What do you do yourself in that kind of
weather--I mean, you can't see any more in the fog than the sailors
can, can you?"
"No," said the gull, "we can't _see_ any more, it is true. But, my
goodness! If we were as helpless in a fog as the sailors are we'd
always be lost. What we do, if we are going anywhere special and we run
into a fog, is to fly up above it--way up where the air is clear. Then
we can find our way as well as ever."
"I see," said the Doctor. "But the storms, what do you do in them to
keep yourselves safe?"
"Well, of course, in storms--bad storms--even seabirds can't always go
where they want. We seagulls never try to battle our way against a real
gale. The petrels sometimes do, but we don't. It is too tiring, and
even when you can come down and rest on the water, swimming, every once
in a while, it's a dangerous game. We fly with the storm--just let it
carry us where it will. Then when the wind dies down we come back and
finish our journey."
"But that takes a long time, doesn't it?" asked the Doctor.
"Oh, yes," said the gull, "it wastes a little time. But, you know, we
very seldom let ourselves get caught by a storm."
"How do you mean?" asked John Dolittle.
"We know, before we reach one, where it is. And we go around it. No
experienced sea bird ever runs his head into a bad storm."
"But how do you know where the storms are?" asked the Doctor.
"Well," said the gull, "I suppose two great advantages we birds have
over the sailors in telling when and where to expect bad weather are
our good eyesight and our experience. For one thing, we can always rise
high in the air and look over the sea for a distance of fifty or sixty
miles. Then if we see gales approaching we can turn and run for it.
And we can put on more speed than the fastest gale that ever blew. And
then, another thing, our experience is so much better than sailors'.
Sailors, poor duffers, think they know the sea--that they spend their
life on it. They don't--believe me, they don't. Half the time they
spend in the cabin, part of the time they spend on shore and a lot of
the time they spend sleeping. And even when they are on deck they're
not always looking at the sea. They fiddle around with ropes and paint
brushes and mops and buckets. You very seldom see a sailor _looking_ at
the sea."
"I suppose they get rather tired of it, poor fellows!" murmured the
Doctor.
"Maybe. But, after all, if you want to be a good seaman the sea is
the thing that counts, isn't it? That's the thing you've got to look
at--to study. Now, we sea birds spend nearly all our lives, night and
day, Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, _looking at the sea_. And what
is the result?" asked the gull, taking a fresh piece of toast from the
rack that Dab-Dab handed him. "The result is this: we _know_ the sea.
Why, Doctor, if you were to shut me up in a little box with no windows
in it and take me out into the middle of any ocean you liked and then
opened the box and let me look at the sea--even if there wasn't a speck
of land in sight--I could tell you what ocean it was, and, almost to a
mile, what part of it we were in. But, of course, I'd have to know what
date it was."
[Illustration: "The gull took a fresh piece of toast"]
"Marvelous!" cried the Doctor. "How do you do it?"
"From the color of it; from the little particles of things that float
in it; from the kind of fishes and sea creatures swimming in it; from
the way the little ripples rippled and the big waves waved; from the
smell of it; from the taste, the saltness of it and a couple of hundred
other things. But, you know, in most cases--not always, but in most
cases--I could tell you where we were with my eyes shut, as soon as I
got out of the box, just from the wind blowing on my feathers."
"Great heavens!" the Doctor exclaimed. "You don't say!"
"That's the main trouble with sailors, Doctor. They don't know winds
the way they ought. They can tell a northeast wind from a west wind.
And a strong one from a weak one. And that's about all. But when you've
spent most of your life, the way we have, flying among the winds, using
them to climb on, to swoop on and to hover on, you get to know that
there's a lot more to a wind besides its direction and its strength.
How often it puffs upward or downward, how often it grows weak or grows
strong, will tell you, if you know the science of winds, a whole lot."
_CHAPTER VI_
WEATHER BUREAUS
When the lunch was over the Doctor took an armchair beside the kitchen
stove and lit his pipe. "I am thinking," he said to the gull, "of
starting a new department in my post office. Many of the birds who have
helped me in this mail business seem to be remarkably good weather
prophets. And what you have just told me about your knowledge of the
sea and storms has given me the idea of opening a weather bureau."
[Illustration: "The Doctor took an armchair beside the kitchen stove"]
"What's that?" asked Jip, who was brushing up the table crumbs, to be
put out later for the birds on the houseboat deck.
"A weather bureau," said the Doctor, "is a very important
thing--especially for shipping and farmers. It is an office for telling
you what kind of weather you're going to have."
"How do they do it?" asked Gub-Gub.
"They don't," said the Doctor--"at least they do sometimes. But as
often as not they're wrong. They do it with instruments--thermometers,
barometers, hygrometers and wind gauges and things. But most weather
bureaus so far have been pretty poor. I think I can do much better with
my birds. They very seldom go wrong in prophesying the weather."
"Well, for what parts of the world do you want to know the weather,
Doctor?" asked the gull. "If it's just for Fantippo or West Africa it
will be easy as pie. All you ever get here is tornadoes. The rest of
the year is just frying heat. But if you want to prophesy the weather
for the Straits of Magellan or Nova Zembla or those countries where
they have all sorts of fancy weathers, it will be a different matter.
Even prophesying the weather for England would keep you busy. Myself, I
never thought that the weather itself knew what it was going to do next
in England."
"The English climate's all right," put in Cheapside, his feathers
ruffling up for a fight. "Don't you get turning up your long nautical
nose at England, my lad. What do you call this 'ere? A climate? Well,
I should call it a Turkish bath. In England we like variety in our
climate. And we get it. That's why Englishmen 'ave such 'earty red
faces. 'Ere the poor creatures turn black."
"I would like," said the Doctor, "to be able to prophesy weather for
every part of the world. I really don't see why I shouldn't; this
office, together with my branch offices, is in communication with birds
going to every corner of the earth. I could improve the farming and the
agriculture of the whole human race. But also, and especially, I want
to have a bureau for ocean weather, to help the ships."
"Ah," said the gull, "for land weather I wouldn't be much help to you.
But when it comes to the oceans, I know a bird who can tell you more
about sea weather than any bureau ever knew."
"Oh," said the Doctor, "who is that?"
"We call him One Eye," said the gull. "He's an old, old albatross.
Nobody knows how old. He lost an eye fighting with a fish eagle over a
flounder. But he's the most marvelous weather prophet that ever lived.
All sea birds have the greatest respect for his opinions. He has never
been known to make a mistake."
"Indeed?" said the Doctor. "I would like very much to meet him."
"I'll get him for you," said the gull. "His home is not very far from
here--out on a rock off the Angola coast. He lives there because the
shellfish are so plentiful on the rock and he's too feeble--with his
bad sight--to catch the other kinds of livelier fish. It's a sort of
dull life for his old age, after all the great traveling he has done.
He'll be no end pleased to know you want his help. I'll go and tell him
right away."
"That will be splendid," said the Doctor. "I think your friend should
be very helpful to us."
So the gull, after thanking the Doctor and Dab-Dab for a very excellent
luncheon, took a couple of postcards which were going to Angola and
flew off to get One Eye, the albatross.
Later in the afternoon the gull returned and with him came the great
One Eye, oldest of bird weather prophets.
The Doctor said afterward that he had never seen a bird who reminded
him so much of a sailor. He had the rolling, straddling walk of a
seafaring man; he smelt strongly of fish; and whenever he spoke of the
weather he had an odd trick of squinting up at the sky with his one
eye, the way old sailors often do.
He agreed with the Doctor that the idea of a bird weather bureau was
quite a possible thing and would lead to much better weather reports
than had so far been possible. Then for a whole hour and a half he gave
the Doctor a lecture on winds. Every word of this John Dolittle wrote
down in a notebook.
Now the wind is the chief thing that changes the weather. And if,
for instance, you know that it is raining in the Channel Islands at
tea-time on a Thursday--and there's a northeast wind blowing--you can
be pretty sure that the rain will reach England some time Thursday
night.
The next thing that the Doctor did was to write to all the branch
postmasters and have them arrange exactly with the different kinds
of birds a time for them to start their yearly migrations--not just
the second week in November, or anything like that--but an exact day
and hour. Then by knowing how fast each kind of bird flies, he could
calculate almost to a minute what time they should arrive at their
destination. And if they were late in arriving, then he would know that
bad weather had delayed them on the way or that they had put off their
starting till storms died down.
The Doctor, the gull, One Eye, Dab-Dab, Cheapside, Speedy-the-Skimmer
and Too-Too the mathematician put their heads together and discussed
far into the night, working out a whole lot more arrangements and
particulars for running a good weather bureau. And a few weeks later
a second brand new notice board appeared on the walls of the Doctor's
post office, beside the one for Outgoing and Incoming Mails.
The new notice board was marked at the top _Weather Reports_, and would
read something like this:
_The Green Herons were one day, three hours and nine minutes late
in their arrival at Cape Horn from the Sandwich Islands. Wind
coming south-southeast. Blustery weather can be expected along the
west coast of Chili and light gales in the Antarctic Sea._
And then the land birds, particularly those that live on berries, were
very helpful to the Doctor in telling him by letter if the Winter was
going to be a hard one or not in their particular country. And he used
to write to farmers all over the world, advising them whether they
could expect a sharp frost, a wet Spring or a dry Summer--which, of
course, helped them in their farming tremendously.
And then the Fantippans, who so far had been very timid about going
far out to sea on account of storms, now that they had a good weather
bureau and knew what weather to expect, began building larger
sailboats, instead of their little frail canoes. And they became what
is called a mercantile nation, traded up and down the shores of West
Africa, and even went as far south as the Cape of Good Hope and entered
the Indian Ocean to traffic in goods with people of foreign lands.
This made the kingdom of Fantippo much richer and more important than
it had been before, of course. And a large grant of money was given by
the King to the Foreign Mails post office, which was used by the Doctor
in making the houseboat better and bigger.
And soon the No-Man's-Land Weather Bureau began to get known abroad.
The farmers in England, who had received such good weather reports by
letter from the Doctor, went up to London and told the government that
their own reports were no good, that a certain John Dolittle, M.D., was
writing them much better reports from some place in Africa.
And the government got quite worked up about it. And they sent the
Royal Meteorologist, an old gray-haired weather man, down to Fantippo
to see how the Doctor was doing it.
[Illustration: "John Dolittle saw him snooping around the post office"]
John Dolittle saw him one day, snooping around the post office, looking
at the notice boards and trying to find out things. But he found out
nothing. And when he got back to England he said to the government:
"He hasn't any new instruments at all. The man's a fake. All he has
down there is an old barge and a whole lot of messy birds flying
around."
_CHAPTER VII_
TEACHING BY MAIL
The educational side of the Doctor's post office was a very important
one and it grew all the time. As he had said to the Skimmer at the
beginning, as soon as the birds and animals realized the helpfulness of
having a post office of their own they used it more and more.
And, of course, as Speedy had foretold, they wrote most of their
letters to the Doctor. Soon the poor man was swamped with mail, asking
for medical advice. The Esquimaux sleigh dogs wrote all the way from
the Arctic Continent to know what they should do about their hair
falling out. Hair--which was all the poor creatures had to keep them
warm against the Polar winds--was, of course, very important to them.
And John Dolittle spent a whole Saturday and Sunday experimenting with
hair tonics on Jip to find a way to cure their trouble. Jip was very
patient about it, knowing that the Doctor was doing it for the good
of his fellow dogs. And he did not grumble--although he did mention
to Dab-Dab that he felt like a chemist's shop from all the different
hair oils the Doctor had used on him. He said they ruined his keen nose
entirely for two weeks, so he couldn't smell straight.
[Illustration: "The Doctor experimented on Jip"]
And besides the letters asking for medical advice, the Doctor got all
sorts of requests from animals all over the world for information
about food for their babies, nesting materials and a thousand other
things. In their new thirst for education the animals asked all manner
of questions, some of which neither the Doctor nor anybody else
could answer: What were the stars made of? Why did the tide rise and
fall--and could it be stopped?
Then, in order to deal with this wide demand for information which had
been brought about by his post office, John Dolittle started, for the
first time in history, courses by correspondence for animals.
And he had printed forms made, called "Things a Young Rabbit Should
Know," "The Care of Feet in Frosty Weather," etc., etc. These he sent
out by mail in thousands.
And then because so many letters were written him about good manners
and proper behavior, he wrote a "Book of Etiquette for Animals." It is
still a very famous work, though copies of it are rare now. But when he
wrote it the Doctor printed a first edition of fifty thousand copies
and sent them all out by mail in one week. It was at this time, too,
that he wrote and circulated another very well-known book of his called
"One-Act Plays for Penguins."
But, alas! instead of making the number of letters he had to answer
less, the Doctor found that by sending out books of information he
increased a hundredfold the already enormous mail he had to attend to.
This is a letter he received from a pig in Patagonia:
"Dear Doctor--I have read your 'Book of Etiquette for Animals' and
liked it very much. I am shortly to be married. Would it be proper
for me to ask the guests to bring turnips to my wedding, instead
of flowers?
"In introducing one well-bred pig to another should you say 'Miss
Virginia Ham, "_meet_" Mr. Frank Footer,' or 'Get acquainted?'
"Yours truly,
"BERTHA BACON.
"P. S.--I have always worn my engagement ring in my nose. Is this
the right place?"
And the Doctor wrote back:
"Dear Bertha--In introducing one pig to another I would avoid using
the word '_meet_.' 'Get acquainted' is quite all right. Remember
that the object of all etiquette and manners should be to make
people comfortable--not uncomfortable.
"I think turnips at a wedding quite proper. You might ask the
guests to leave the tops on. They will then look more like a
bouquet.
"Sincerely yours,
"JOHN DOLITTLE."