The Queen said, "Oh yes; and anything else you like to ask for."
The bat said, "H'm! this seat isn't very comfortable. What's that thing up there?"
"That's the crown," the Queen said.
And the King remarked, "H'm!" and in a moment he was hanging upside down from the bottom of the crown.
And the people cheered their King.
But the Queen just said, "Good-bye, your Majesty."
"Good-bye," the Bat said. "I suppose you won't marry me?"
"Don't be silly," the late Queen said; and she slipped behind the curtain and ran through the deserted halls again, and once more out into the garden. And once again she watered her favourite plants, for the last time, and then flew right up into the air and away, away over the troubled seas, to the land that lay low in the horizon.
"How delightful it feels not to be a Queen any longer!" she said to herself. "I always used to feel afraid, when I sat under that great crown, that it might fall on my head and squash me altogether. But I wonder how the bat got on."
That the Queen never knew; but this was what happened. The bat took to kingship quite as easily as a duck takes to water, and, for reasons that the Queen gave, made a most popular ruler—even though he was strictly just. True, there were only three people in the kingdom who understood him, and they were mouse-trap makers who had learnt the bat language from mice. But, as the King always superintended the carrying out of his own edicts, they did not care to play tricks. And the Bat language was taught in all the schools, so that it became the state tongue. And all the ladies took to wearing brown sealskin cloaks with great puffed sleeves and capes, so as to look as much like bats as possible, and they all pretended to be very weak-sighted and turned night into day, in imitation of the King.