“You wouldn’t have understood me if I had.” “What would have been the good?” said Polynesia, dusting some cracker-crumbs off her left wing. “You never talked that way to me before.” “That means, ‘Is the porridge hot yet?’-in bird-language.” “If I say, ‘Polly wants a cracker,’ you understand me. “Oh, we parrots can talk in two languages-people’s language and bird-language,” said Polynesia proudly. “I knew that parrots can talk,” said the Doctor. Now listen, Doctor, and I’ll tell you something. “Oh, there are plenty of animal-doctors,” said John Dolittle, putting the flower-pots outside on the window-sill to get the rain. Take care of animals instead-they’ll soon find it out. Give the silly people up-if they haven’t brains enough to see you’re the best doctor in the world. When the Cat’s-meat-Man had gone the parrot flew off the window on to the Doctor’s table and said, And look, all the farmers round about who had lame horses and weak lambs-they’d come. But they’ll get sick anyway, because the old women always give ’em too much to eat. But as you say, maybe it ain’t quite fair on the animals. “Just a little something to make them droopy-like was what I had reference to. “Oh, I didn’t mean real sick,” answered the Cat’s-meat-Man. And if they didn’t get sick fast enough, I could put something in the meat I sell ’em to make ’em sick, see?” Do you know that? You see, I’d send all the old women who had sick cats or dogs to you. And listen: you can make a lot of money doctoring animals. Well, it’s wonderful-that’s all can be said-wonderful. But my wife, Theodosia, she’s a scholar, she is. That book you wrote-about cats, why, it’s wonderful! I can’t read or write myself-or maybe I’d write some books. “You see, Doctor,” the Cat’s-meat-Man went on, “you know all about animals-much more than what these here vets do. She stopped singing and started to listen. The parrot, Polynesia, was sitting in the window looking out at the rain and singing a sailor-song to herself.
“Why don’t you give up being a people’s doctor, and be an animal-doctor?” asked the Cat’s-meat-Man. It happened one day that the Doctor was sitting in his kitchen talking with the Cat’s-meat-Man who had come to see him with a stomach-ache. Previous Chapter Next Chapter The Second Chapter: Animal Language
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