Chapter VI: Part II: Chapter I (2)

"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.

"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."

"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."

"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.

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.

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."