h;
but its back was glossy black with huge red spots on it.

"There isn't an entymologist in the whole world who wouldn't give all he
has to be in my shoes to-day," said the Doctor--"Hulloa! This Jabizri's
got something on his leg--Doesn't look like mud. I wonder what it is."

He took the beetle carefully out of the box and held it by its back
in his fingers, where it waved its six legs slowly in the air. We all
crowded about him peering at it. Rolled around the middle section of its
right foreleg was something that looked like a thin dried leaf. It was
bound on very neatly with strong spider-web.

It was marvelous to see how John Dolittle with his fat heavy fingers
undid that cobweb cord and unrolled the leaf, whole, without tearing it
or hurting the precious beetle. The Jabizri he put back into the box.
Then he spread the leaf out flat and examined it.

You can imagine our surprise when we found that the inside of the leaf
was covered with signs and pictures, drawn so tiny that you almost
needed a magnifying-glass to tell what they were. Some of the signs
we couldn't make out at all; but nearly all of the pictures were quite
plain, figures of men and mountains mostly. The whole was done in a
curious sort of brown ink.

For several moments there was a dead silence while we all stared at the
leaf, fascinated and mystified.

"I think this is written in blood," said the Doctor at last. "It turns
that color when it's dry. Somebody pricked his finger to make these
pictures. It's an old dodge when you're short of ink--but highly
unsanitary--What an extraordinary thing to find tied to a beetle's leg!
I wish I could talk beetle language, and find out where the Jabizri got
it from."

"But what is it?" I asked--"Rows of little pictures and signs. What do
you make of it, Doctor?"

"It's a letter," he said--"a picture letter. All these little things
put together mean a message--But why give a message to a beetle to
carry--and to a Jabizri, the rarest beetle in the world?--What an
extraordinary thing!"

Then he fell to muttering over the pictures.

"I wonder what it means: men walking up a mountain; men walking into a
hole in a mountain; a mountain falling down--it's a good drawing, that;
men pointing to their open mouths; bars--prison-bars, perhaps; men
praying; men lying down--they look as though they might be sick; and
last of all, just a mountain--a peculiar-shaped mountain."

All of a sudden the Doctor looked up