In writing the story of our adventures in the Moon I, Thomas Stubbins, secretary to John Dolittle, M.D. (and son of Jacob Stubbins, the cobbler of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh), find myself greatly puzzled. It is not an easy task, remembering day by day and hour by hour those crowded and exciting weeks. It is true I made many notes for the Doctor, books full of them. But that information was nearly all of a highly scientific kind. And I feel that I should tell the story here not for the scientist so much as for the general reader. And it is in that I am perplexed. For the story could be told in many ways. People are so different in what they want to know about a voyage. I had thought at one time Jip could help me; and after reading him some chapters as I had first set them down I asked for his opinion. I discovered he was mostly interested in whether we had seen any rats in the Moon. I found I could not tell him. I didn’t remember seeing any; and yet I am sure there must have been some—or some sort of creature like a rat. Then I asked Gub-Gub. And what he was chiefly concerned to hear was the kind of vegetables we had fed on. (Dab-Dab snorted at me for my pains and said I should have known better than to ask him.) I tried my mother. She wanted to know how we had managed when our underwear wore out—and a whole lot of other matters about our living conditions, hardly any of which I could answer. Next I went to Matthew Mugg. And the things he wanted to learn were worse than either my mother’s or Jip’s: Were there any shops in the Moon? What were the dogs and cats like? The good Cats’-meat-Man seemed to have imagined it a place not very different from Puddleby or the East End of London. No, trying to get at what most people wanted to read concerning the Moon did not bring me much profit. I couldn’t seem to tell them any of the things they were most anxious to know. It reminded me of the first time I had come to the Doctor’s house, hoping to be hired as his assistant, and dear old Polynesia the parrot had questioned me. “Are you a good noticer?” she had asked. I had always thought I was—pretty good anyhow. But now I felt I had been a very poor noticer. For it seemed I hadn’t noticed any of the things I should have done to make the story of our voyage interesting to the ordinary public. The trouble was of course _attention_. Human attention is like butter: you can only spread it so thin and no thinner. If you try to spread it over too many things at once you just don’t remember them. And certainly during all our waking hours upon the Moon there was so much for our ears and eyes and minds to take in it is a wonder, I often think, that any clear memories at all remain.