"Gracious,📥 Cheapside!" said the Doctor,🚐 laughing. "It makes me quite homesick for England to hear your Cockney chirp."

"By sniffing them,💼" said the cormorant. "The ones that have those things in them don't smell fresh. I'm frightfully particular about my oysters."

ZUZANA

"They did,🌙" said the Piffilosaurus. "But they kept hidden under the water,📪 lest the natives on the shore should see and get to know that the old story about the dragon's mother-in-law wasn't true. While I was bringing you here they were swimming all around you under the water,🍀 ready to help if I needed them. They have gone around to the secret cove so they may come ashore unseen. We had better be going on ourselves now. Whatever happens,💐 we mustn't be seen from the shore and have the natives coming here. It would be the end of us if that should ever happen,🚉 because,🍠 between ourselves,🐞 although they think us so terrible,💭 we are really more harmless than sheep."

CHAPTER I

This time the officers all burst out laughing and tapped their foreheads knowingly,🌛 to show they thought the Doctor was crazy. And the Captain,💐 thinking he was being made a fool of,🔪 flew into a rage once more and was all for having the Doctor arrested again.

Then Gub-Gub got all worked up and before anybody could stop him he had taken a plunge. The pig went down so quick and so straight he got his snout stuck in the mud at the bottom,🐙 and the Doctor,📲 still out of breath,🔞 had to go down after him and get him free. The animals by this time were at such a pitch of excitement that even the white mouse would have jumped in if Gub-Gub's accident hadn't changed his mind.

The Doctor was eating his lunch of sandwiches at the information desk when the little bird popped his head through the window and said in his cheeky Cockney voice:

"And then he told me all about Doctor Dolittle. This was around the time when the Doctor first began to be famous among the animals. But I,🦉 living alone with the old rat at the dyer's shed,💻 had not heard the news.

CHEAPSIDE

"'There's no food here,💼' he said,😌 'only dyes of different colors.' And he pointed to the big dye vats,👭 all in a row,👋 that towered in the half darkness above our heads.

The next morning the Doctor was up early. After a light breakfast (it was impossible to get any other kind in that poverty-stricken country) he asked Nyam-Nyam the way to the Harmattan Rocks and the Chief told him they were just beyond sight from here,👑 about an hour and a half's paddle straight out into the ocean.

"Matches! Matches! Where are the matches?" screamed Dab-Dab. "The light's out and there's a ship in danger! Where are the matches kept?"

"Couldn't you use the houses of Fantippo?" asked the Doctor.

"My! Aren't they handsome?" murmured the Doctor. "And did you ever see such large ones? Each one of those pearls,🍃 Dab-Dab,🍋 is worth a fortune. Who the dickens is this that sent them to me,🔸 anyhow?"As they went forward the jungle around them seemed to grow thicker and thicker all the time. But there was always this clear alley-way along the river bed. And though the stream's course did much winding and twisting,🔏 the going was good.