t--except the Cat's-meat-Man, who didn't mind any kind of
animals. But the Cat's-meat Man wasn't very rich and he only got sick
once a year--at Christmas-time, when he used to give the Doctor
sixpence for a bottle of medicine.

Sixpence a year wasn't enough to live on--even in those days, long ago;
and if the Doctor hadn't had some money saved up in his money-box, no
one knows what would have happened.

And he kept on getting still more pets; and of course it cost a lot to
feed them. And the money he had saved up grew littler and littler.

Then he sold his piano, and let the mice live in a bureau-drawer. But
the money he got for that too began to go, so he sold the brown suit he
wore on Sundays and went on becoming poorer and poorer.

And now, when he walked down the street in his high hat, people would
say to one another, "There goes John Dolittle, M.D.! There was a time
when he was the best known doctor in the West Country--Look at him
now--He hasn't any money and his stockings are full of holes!"

But the dogs and the cats and the children still ran up and followed
him through the town--the same as they had done when he was rich.

THE SECOND CHAPTER

ANIMAL LANGUAGE

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.

"Why don't you give up being a people's doctor, and be an
animal-doctor?" asked the Cat's-meat-Man.

The parrot, Polynesia, was sitting in the window looking out at the
rain and singing a sailor-song to herself. She stopped singing and
started to listen.

"You see, Doctor," the Cat's-meat-Man went on, "you know all about
animals--much more than what these here vets do. That book you
wrote--about cats, why, it's wonderful! I can't read or write
myself--or maybe _I_'D write some books. But my wife, Theodosia, she's
a scholar, she is. And she read your book to me. Well, it's
wonderful--that's all can be said--wonderful. You might have been a cat
yourself. You know the way they think. And listen: you can make a lot
of money doctoring animals. Do you know that? You see, I'd send all
the old women who had sick cats or dogs to you. And if they didn't get
sick fast enough, I could put something in the meat I sell 'em to make
'em sick, see?"

"Oh, no," said the Doctor quickly. "You mustn't do that. That
wouldn't be right."

"Oh, I didn't mean real sick," answered the Cat's-meat-Man. "Just