Doctor Dolittle’s Post Office quotes

So I go aboard her, with pistols ready, thinking maybe she's a slaver, trying to play tricks on me. I creep all over the ship, but not a soul do I meet. At last in the cabin I find a pig—asleep in an armchair!

Do you usually leave your craft in the charge of a pig, with orders to go to sleep?

If you own the ship, why aren't you on her? Where have you been?"

What we like are solid English buildings, where the people don't shriek and whoop and play drums all day—quiet buildings, like old barns and stables, where, if people come at all, they come in a proper, dignified manner, arriving and leaving at regular hours.

We like people, you understand—in their right place. But nesting mother birds must have quiet.

"

"

They think we live on men and breathe fire! But all we ever really eat is bananas.

And when anyone tries to come here we go down to a hollow in the middle of the island and suck up the mist, the fog, that always hangs around there. Then we come back to the beach and roar and rampage.

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.

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."

"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.

"

"Ah, England!" cried Gub-Gub sentimentally. "

What is there more beautiful in life than the heart of a young lettuce in the Spring?

"

"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.

"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.

"

"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——"

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."

"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.

"

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.

"

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."

"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.

I tried to catch a cold. I didn't really want a cold, you understand, but I did want to make sure that my new thermometer worked. But I couldn't even catch a cold.

I was very sad—healthy but sad.

"Well, about this time I met another young doctor who was in the same fix as myself—having no patients. Said he to me: 'I'll tell you what we'll do, let's start a sanitarium.'"

"'Phipps,' I said, 'I don't think that's honest.

I became a doctor to cure people—not to pamper them.

'

"These things added a good deal of jolliness to the meal and some of them were very clever inventions.

Why, they even had a speaking tube for things you are not allowed to mention at table.

"

"

But none of us are ever content for long, you know—foolish creatures that we are.

And by the time the second Summer was coming I was longing to be a free mouse, to roam the world and all that sort of thing. And then, too, I wanted to get married. Maybe the Spring was getting into my blood.

"Now, some people have an idea that bats and owls can see in the dark because we have some peculiar kind of eyes. It's not so. Peculiar ears we have—but not eyes.

We can see in the dark because we practise it. It's all a matter of practice—the same as the piano or anything else.

We get up when other people go to bed, and go to bed when other people get up, because we prefer the dark; and you'd be surprised how much nicer it is when you get used to it.

"When I had brought the children right up to this house their mother and father made a tremendous fuss, weeping over them, as though they had been saved from some terrible danger.

In my opinion grown-up humans are even more stupid than the young ones.

You'd think, from the way that mother and father carried on, that those children had been wrecked on a desert island or something, instead of spending a couple of hours in the pleasant woods.

"They were never afraid of the dark again. Because, you see—as I said to the Doctor one day, when we were talking over the multiplication tables and other philosophy—fear is usually ignorance.

Once you know a thing, you're no longer afraid of it.

And those youngsters got to know the dark—and then they saw, of course, that it was just as harmless as the day.

Too-Too yawned and blinked up sleepily at the lantern hanging above his head.

"Seeing in the dark," he ended, "is all a matter of practice—same as the piano or anything else."

And now it came, at last, to the pushmi-pullyu's turn for a story. He was very shy and modest and when the animals asked him the following night he said in his very well-bred manner:

"Easy comes, easy goes," murmured Gub-Gub. "Never mind.

I don't suppose it's really such fun being rich. Wealthy people have to behave so unnaturally.

"

When Dab-Dab entered the postmaster's office with the milk she found John Dolittle reading the letter. Looking at the floor, she gave a squawk of disgust.

"It's a good thing for you Sarah isn't here," she cried. "Just look at the state of your office—it's full of snake!"

It was a long but a most interesting journey that the Doctor took from Fantippo to Lake Junganyika. It turned out that the turtle's home lay many miles inland in the heart of one of the wildest, most jungly parts of Africa.

But presently, as they went up it, the stream grew narrower and narrower. Till at last, like many rivers in tropical countries, it was nothing more than the dry bed of a brook, or a chain of small pools with long sand bars between.

Overhead the thick jungle arched and hung like a tunnel of green.

This was a good thing by day-time, as it kept the sun off better than a parasol.

And, even with it, the going was slow and hard enough.

The mangroves spread out long, twisting, crossing arms in every direction to bar your passage—as though they were determined to guard the secrets of this silent, gloomy land where men could not make a home and seldom ever came.

Indeed, if it had not been for the giant water snake, to whom mangrove swamps were the easiest kind of traveling, they would never have been able to make their way forward.

To the right and left the Doctor could see the fringe of the swamp trees running around the lake, disappearing in the distance North and South.

Out in the open great banks of gray mist rolled and joined and separated as the wailing wind pushed them fretfully hither and thither over the face of the waters.

"My word!" the Doctor murmured in a quiet voice. "Here one could almost believe that the Flood was not over yet!"

"There isn't any other place I like as well," said Mudface.

"It's so hard to find a country where you're not disturbed these days."

"Here, drink this," the Doctor ordered, handing him a tea-cup full of some brown mixture. "I think you will find that that will soon relieve the stiffness in your front legs."

"Not one," said the turtle. "It's all like this, just miles and miles of mud and water. I used to like it—in fact I do still. I wouldn't wish for anything better if it weren't for this wretched gout of mine."

"Well," said the Doctor, "if you haven't got an island we must make one for you."

"Make one!" cried the turtle. "How would you go about it?"