They only met once a year, when the husbands came over to visit the wives for a great feast-- Christmas-time, most likely. Yes, he's a wonderful man is the Doctor. And as for animals, well, there ain't no one knows as much about 'em as what he does."
"How did he get to know so much about animals?" I asked.
The cat's-meat-man stopped and leant down to whisper in my car.
"HE TALKS THEIR LANGUAGE," he said in a hoarse, mysterious voice.
"The animals' language?" I cried.
"Why certainly," said Matthew. "All animals have some kind of a language. Some sorts talk more than others; some only speak in sign-language, like deaf-and-dumb. But the Doctor, he understands them all--birds as well as animals. We keep it a secret though, him and me, because folks only laugh at you when you speak of it.
Why, he can even write animal-language. He reads aloud to his pets. He's wrote history-books in monkey-talk, poetry in canary language and comic songs for magpies to sing. It's a fact. He's now busy learning the language of the shellfish. But he says it's hard work--and he has caught some terrible colds, holding his head under water so much. He's a great man."
"He certainly must be," I said. "I do wish he were home so I could meet him."
"Well, there's his house, look," said the cat's, meat-man--"that little one at the bend in the road there--the one high up-- like it was sitting on the wall above the street."