"
"My! You don't say so!" said the Doctor.
"You never talked that way to me before."
"What would have been the good?" said
Polynesia, dusting some cracker-crumbs off her
left wing. "You wouldn't have understood me
if I had."
"Tell me some more," said the Doctor, all
excited; and he rushed over to the dresser-drawer
and came back with the butcher's book and a
pencil. "Now don't go too fast--and I'll write
it down. This is interesting--very interesting
--something quite new. Give me the Birds'
A.B.C. first--slowly now."
So that was the way the Doctor came to know
that animals had a language of their own and
could talk to one another. And all that afternoon,
while it was raining, Polynesia sat on the
kitchen table giving him bird words to put down
in the book.
At tea-time, when the dog, Jip, came in, the
parrot said to the Doctor, "See, HE'S talking to
you."
"Looks to me as though he were scratching
his ear," said the Doctor.
"But animals don't always speak with their
mouths," said the parrot in a high voice, raising
her eyebrows. "They talk with their ears,
with their feet, with their tails--with everything.
Sometimes they don't WANT to make a
noise. Do you see now the way he's twitching
up one side of his nose?"
"What's that mean?" asked the Doctor.
"That means, `Can't you see that it has
stopped raining?'" Polynesia answered. "He
is asking you a question. Dogs nearly always
use their noses for asking questions.
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