Now please don't imagine, just because these lions growled, that they were cross. They weren't anything of the sort. That was just their way of talking. Your dog barks and growls, and that is his way of speaking. Your cat mews and sometimes growls or "spits," and often purrs, especially when you tickle her ears. And a lion always growls when he talks. When he is angry he roars—that's the difference. And, I almost forgot, lions can purr, too, only it sounds like a buzz saw instead of the way your cat purrs. But then a lion's throat is very big, and so his purr has to be big also.
"Want to have some fun?" asked Switchie, as Nero lay down in the jungle shade.
"That's what I came over for," Nero answered. "Only my mother said I wasn't to get into any mischief."
"Oh, no, we won't do anything like that!" replied Switchie. "We'll just go along in the jungle and have some fun. I know where there is some soft grass, and we can roll over and over in that and scratch our backs."
"Fine!" said Nero. "We'll go there."
So Switchie led the way along another jungle path to a place where very few trees grew. In the midst of these few trees was a grassy place. That is, it had been green and grassy once when it was raining, which it does for several months at a time in the jungle. But the rains had stopped, the hot sun had come out from behind the clouds and dried the grass up, so that it was now like hay.
"And it's just fine to roll in. It scratches your back just hard enough," said Switchie, making his tail, with the tuft of hair on the end, swing about in a funny way.
"I like to have my back scratched," said Nero.
So the two boy lions went to have some fun and roll in the dried grass. It was just as if you had gone to roll and tumble on the hay in Grandpa's barn. The lion boys leaped about, jumped over one another, made believe bite one another and played tag with their paws.
As Switchie had said, the dried, curled grass tickled their backs just enough when they rolled over and over in it. But at last Switchie said: