Page 63 - English Expedition Class 4

So as time went by, the Doctor got more and more animals and the number of
people who came to see him reduced. At last, the Doctor had no patients 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 Christmastime, when he used to
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give the Doctor a sixpence for a bottle of medicine. Sixpence a year wasn’t enough to
live on even in those days and if the Doctor hadn’t had some money saved up in his
money box, no one knows what would have happened.
He kept on getting still more pets, and of course it cost a lot to feed them. So the

money he had saved up grew littler and littler and he grew poorer and poorer.
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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.

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.
One day the Doctor was sitting in his kitchen, talking with the Cat’s-meat-Man
who had come to see him because he had a stomach ache.

‘Why don’t you give up being a people’s doctor and become 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 to the Cat’s-meat-

Man.
‘You see, Doctor,’ the Cat’s-meat-Man went on, ‘you know all about animals much
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more than what these vets do. That book you wrote about cats, why, it’s wonderful!
Be an animal doctor.’

When the Cat’s-meat-Man had gone, the parrot flew off the window onto the
Doctor’s table and said, ‘That man’s right. Give the silly people up if they don’t have
brains enough to see you’re the best doctor in the world. Take care of animals instead.
Be an animal doctor.’

‘Oh, there are plenty of animal doctors,’ said John Dolittle.
‘Yes, there are plenty,’ said Polynesia. ‘But none of them are any good at all. Now
listen, Doctor, and I’ll tell you something. Did you know that animals can talk?’
‘I knew that parrots can talk,’ said the Doctor.

7 sixpence: a silver coin 9 vet: veterinarian; a doctor who treats animals
8 bureau-drawer: a chest of drawers
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