"Do stop talking, Ann, and listen. Whoever they are in there, they
are making so much noise they can't possibly hear me, so I'm going to
creep into those bushes and see what I can see."

As he spoke Rudolf carefully parted the bushes at a spot where they
were thin and peeped between the leaves, Ann and Peter crowding each
other to see over his shoulder. They looked into a kind of open glade
not much larger than a good-sized room and walled on all sides by tall
trees and thick underbrush. It had a flooring of soft green turf, and
about in the middle lay a great rock as large as a playhouse. This
rock was all covered over with moss and lichens, and the strange thing
about it was that a neat door had been cut in its side. Before this
door, talking and waving his hands to the crowd that thronged about
him, stood a man--the queerest little man the children had ever seen!
He looked like a collection of stout sacks stuffed very tightly and
tied firmly at the necks. One sack made his head, another larger one
his body, four more his arms and legs. His broad face, though rather
dull, wore a good-humored expression, and he smiled as he looked about
him.

A pile of empty sacking-bags lay on the ground beside him, and from
time to time he caught up one of these, ran his eye over the crowd,
chose one of them, and popped him, or it, as it happened to be, into
the sack which he then swung on his shoulder and heaved into the open
doorway in the big rock, where it disappeared from sight. He would
then taken another sack and make a fresh selection, looking about him
all the while with sleepy good humor, and paying little if any
attention to the cries, questions, and complaints with which he was
attacked on all sides.