"All right," said the Doctor. "I'll mention that."
So the Doctor's letter was written and addressed to Matthew Mugg, Esquire, Cats' Meat Merchant, Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, Slopshire, England. And it was sent off by Quip-the-Carrier.
The Doctor did not expect an answer to it right away because the Cats'-Meat-Man's wife was a very slow reader and a still slower writer. And anyhow, Cheapside could not be expected to visit Puddleby for another week yet. He always stayed in London until after the Easter Bank Holiday. His wife refused to let him leave for the country till the spring family had been taught by their father how to find the houses where people threw out crumbs; how to pick up oats from under the cab horses' nose bags without being stamped on by the horses' hoofs; how to get about in the trafficky streets of London and a whole lot of other things that young city birds have to know.
In the meantime, while Quip was gone, life went forward busily and happily at the Doctor's post office. The animals, Too-Too, Dab-Dab, Gub-Gub, the pushmi-pullyu, the white mouse and Jip all agreed that they found living in a houseboat post office great fun. Whenever they got tired of their floating home they would go off for picnic parties to the Island of No-Man's-Land, which was now more often called by the name John Dolittle had given it, "the Animals' Paradise."
On these trips too, the Doctor sometimes accompanied them. He was glad to, because he so got an opportunity of talking with the many different kinds of animals there about the signs they were in the habit of using. And on these signs, which he carefully put down in notebooks, he built up a sort of written language for animals to use—or animal scribble, as he called it—the same as he had done with the birds.
"He held scribbling classes for the animals"