"Dear me!" said the Doctor. "That's too bad. Well, I dare say I'll find some way to pay the farmer back."
For a long time Dab-Dab, the motherly housekeeper, had been trying to get the Doctor to take a holiday from his post office business.
"You know, Doctor," said she, "you're going to get sick—that's what's going to happen to you, as sure as you're alive. No man can work the way you've been doing for the last few months and not pay for it. Now you've got the post office going properly, why don't you hand it over to the King's postmen to run and give yourself a rest? And, anyway, aren't you ever going back to Puddleby?"
"Oh, yes," said John Dolittle. "All in good time, Dab-Dab."
"But you must take a holiday," the duck insisted. "Get away from the post office for a while. Go up the coast in a canoe for a change of air—if you won't go home."
Well, the Doctor kept saying that he would go. But he never did—until something happened in the natural history line of great enough importance to take him from his post office work. This is how it came about:
One day the Doctor was opening the mail addressed to him, when he came upon a package about the size and shape of a large egg. He undid the outer wrapper, which was made of seaweed. Inside he found a letter and a pair of oyster shells tied together like a box.
