As they rowed, it suddenly became apparent to the goodly knight that there was someone watching him and, probably, finding it a great deal funnier than it really was. Thus he extricated himself in a flurry, kicked the horse a final time, said, ‘Yah! Take that, you beast! That’s what you get for being an ungodly horse, you know!’, and began to dust himself off and glance hither and thither for the watcher, whose booted feet he did not misdoubt he had seen standing before him. It took more looking to find him than the knight would have suspected. And when he found him, he was quite too startled to know what to think at all. There, about another lance-length before him, standing in the midst of the path, was a man with a thick brown beard which hung to his belt, a crimson hood which came to a point atop his head, and carrying a short carved stave exactly like the ones which constables are accustomed to carry now. But the queerest part about him was that, minus the crest of his hood, the top of his head probably only reached just above Sir Tor’s belt. He was a dwarf: one of the sons of stone from the mountain, created of Mótsognir, the father of all that sturdy, stubborn, stumpy people.