e door of the stove flew open, and out tumbled more of the
little queer children, dozens and dozens of them. The more they came
tumbling out into the hut, the more there seemed to be chattering in
the stove and squeezing to get out one over the top of another. The
noise of chattering and laughing would have made your head spin. And
everyone of the children out of the stove had a little turnip like
the others, and waved it about and showed it to the old man, and
laughed like anything.

"Ho," says the old man, "so you are the thieves who have stolen the
turnips from the top of the dovecot?"

"Yes," cried the children, and the chatter rattled as fast as
hailstones on the roof. "Yes! yes! yes! _We_ stole the turnips."

"How did you get on to the top of the dovecot when the door into the
house was bolted and fast?"

At that the children all burst out laughing, and did not answer a
word.

"Laugh you may," said the old man; "but it is I who get the scolding
when the turnips fly away in the night."

"Never mind! never mind!" cried the children. "We'll pay for the
turnips."

"How can you pay for them?" asks the old man. "You have got nothing to
pay with."

All the children chattered together, and looked at the old man and
smiled. Then one of them said to the old man, "Are you hungry,
grandfather?"

"Hungry!" says the old man. "Why, yes, of course I am, my dear. I've
been looking for you all day, and I had to start without my dinner."

"If you are hungry, open the cupboard behind you."

The old man opened the cupboard.

"Take out the tablecloth."

The old man took out the tablecloth.

"Spread it on the table."

The old man spread the tablecloth on the table.

"Now!" shouted the children, chattering like a thousand nests full of
young birds, "we'll all sit down and have dinner."

They pulled out the benches and gave the old man a chair at one end,
and all crowded round the table ready to begin.

"But there's no food," said the old man.

How they laughed!

"Grandfather," one of them sings out from the other end of the table,
"you just tell the tablecloth to turn inside out,"

"How?" says he.

"Tell the tablecloth to turn inside out. That's easy enough."

"There's no harm in doing that," thinks the old man; so he says to the
tablecloth as firmly as he could, "Now then you, tablecloth, turn
inside out!"

The tablecloth hove itself up into the air, and rolled itself this
way and that as if it were in