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.
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.
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.
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."
