sat sniffling.

"I'm so lonely," he said. "Nobody calls. Nobody pays me any attention. And I came here for the Society. No one is fonder of Society than I am."

I sat down on a flowering branch near him and shouted at him, "What's the use of Society when you eat it up?" I said.

He jumped up and lashed his tail and growled but at first he could not see me.

"What's it for but to be eaten up?" he roared. "First I want it to entertain me and then I want it for dessert. Where are you? Who are you?"

"I'm Queen Crosspatch—Queen Silverbell as was," I said. "I suppose you have heard of me?"

"I've heard nothing good," he growled. "A good chewing is what you want!"

He had heard something about me, but not enough. The truth was he didn't really believe in Fairies—which was what brought him into trouble.

By this time he had seen me and he was ignorant enough to think that he could catch me, so he laid down flat in the thick, green grass and stretched his big paws out and rested his nose on them, thinking I would be taken in and imagine he was going to sleep. I burst out laughing at him and swung to and fro on my flowery branch.

"Do you want to eat me?" I said. "You'd need two or three quarts of me with sugar and cream—like strawberries."

That made him so angry that he sprang roaring at my tree and snapped and shook it and tore it with his claws. But I flew up into the air and buzzed all about him and he got furious—just furious. He jumped up in the air and lashed his tail and thrashed his tail and CRASHED his tail, and he turned round and round and tore up the grass.

"Don't be a silly," I said. "It's a nice big tufty sort of tail and you will only wear it out."

So then he opened his mouth and roared and roared. And what do you suppose I did? I flew right into his mouth. First I flew into his throat and buzzed about like a bee and made him cough and cough and cough—but he couldn't cough me up. He coughed and he houghed and he woughed; he tried to catch me with his tongue and he tried to catch me with his teeth but I simply made myself tinier and tinier and got between two big fierce white double ones and took one of my Fairy Workers' hammers out of my pocket and hammered and hammered and hammered until he began to have such a jumping toothache that he ran leaping and roaring down the Huge Green Hill and leaping and roaring down the village street to the dentist's to get some toothache drops. You can just imagine how all the people rushed into their houses, and how the mothers screamed and clutched their children and hid under beds and tables and in coalbins, and how the fathers fumbled about for guns. As for the dentist, he locked his door and bolted it and barred it, and when he found his gun he poked it out of the window and fired it off as fast as ever he could until he had fired fifty times, only he was too frightened to hit anything. But the village street was so full of flashes and smoke and bullets that Mr. Lion turned with ten big roars and galloped down the street, with guns fired out of every window where the family could afford to keep a gun.

When he got to his home in the Huge Green Hill, he just laid down and cried aloud and screamed and kicked his hind legs until he scratched a hole in the floor of his cave.

"Just because I'm a Lion," he sobbed, "just because I'm a poor, sensitive, helpless, orphan Lion nobody