"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 a whirlwind, and then suddenly laid itself flat on the table again. And somehow or other it had covered itself with dishes and plates and wooden spoons with pictures on them, and bowls of soup and mushrooms and kasha, and meat and cakes and fish and ducks, and everything else you could think of, ready for the best dinner in the world.