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 has one particle of manners. They won't even sell me a bottle of toothache drops. And I wasn't going to touch that dentist—until he had cured me and wrapped up the bottle nicely in paper. Not a touch was I going to touch him until he had done that."
He opened his mouth so wide to roar with grief that I flew out of it. I had meant to give him a lesson and I'd given him one. When I flew out of his mouth of course his beautiful double teeth stopped aching. It was such a relief to him that it made quite a change in his nature and he sat up and began to smile. It was a slow smile which spread into a grin even while the tear–drops hung on his whiskers.
"My word! How nice," he said. "It's stopped."
I had flown to the top of his ear and I shouted down it.
"I stopped it," I said. "And I began it. And if you don't behave yourself, I'll give you earache and that will be worse."
Before I had given him his lesson he would have jumped at me but now he knew better. He tried to touch my feelings and make me sorry for him. He put one paw before his eyes and began to sniff again.
"I am a poor sensitive lonely orphan Lion,' he said.