Here the Doctor’s experience with the Singing Trees came in very helpfully. I noticed as I watched him go to work with what small apparatus he had brought with him that he now seemed much surer of how to begin. And it was indeed a surprisingly short time before he was actually in conversation with them, as though he had almost been talking with them all his life.
“It was a rocky gulch”
Presently he turned to me and spoke almost the thought that was in my mind.
“Stubbins,” he said, “the ease with which these plants answer me would almost make me think they have spoken with a man before! Look, I can actually make responses with the lips, like ordinary human speech.”
He dropped the little contrivance he held in his hands and hissing softly through his teeth he gave out a sort of whispered cadence. It was a curious combination between some one humming a tune and hissing a conversational sentence.
Usually it had taken John Dolittle some hours, occasionally some days, to establish a communication with these strange almost human moon trees good enough to exchange ideas with them. But both Chee-Chee and I grunted with astonishment at the way they instantly responded to his whispered speech. Swinging their leafy tendrils around to meet the breeze at a certain angle, they instantly gave back a humming, hissing message that might have been a repetition of that made by the Doctor himself.
“They say they are glad to see us, Stubbins,” he jerked out over his shoulder.
“Why, Doctor,” I said, “this is marvelous! You got results right away. I never saw anything like it.”
“They have spoken with a man before,” he repeated. “Not a doubt of it. I can tell by the way they—Good gracious, what’s this?”