Myths and Legends of Our Own Land, vol 1 | Page 2

Hessian Storm Ship on
the Hudson Why Spuyten Duyvil is so Named The Ramapo
Salamander Chief Croton The Retreat from Mahopac Niagara The
Deformed of Zoar Horseheads Kayuta and Waneta The Drop Star The
Prophet of Palmyra A Villain's Cremation The Monster Mosquito The

Green Picture The Nuns of Carthage The Skull in the Wall The
Haunted Mill Old Indian Face The Division of the Saranacs An Event
in Indian Park The Indian Plume Birth of the Water-Lily Rogers's Slide
The Falls at Cohoes Francis Woolcott's Night-Riders Polly's Lover
Crosby, the Patriot Spy The Lost Grave of Paine The Rising of
Gouverneur Morris

THE HUDSON AND ITS HILLS
RIP VAN WINKLE
The story of Rip Van Winkle, told by Irving, dramatized by Boucicault,
acted by Jefferson, pictured by Darley, set to music by Bristow, is the
best known of American legends. Rip was a real personage, and the
Van Winkles are a considerable family at this day. An idle,
good-natured, happy-go-lucky fellow, he lived, presumably, in the
village of Catskill, and began his long sleep in 1769. His wife was a
shrew, and to escape her abuse Rip often took his dog and gun and
roamed away to the Catskills, nine miles westward, where he lounged
or hunted, as the humor seized him. It was on a September evening,
during a jaunt on South Mountain, that he met a stubby, silent man, of
goodly girth, his round head topped with a steeple hat, the skirts of his
belted coat and flaps of his petticoat trousers meeting at the tops of
heavy boots, and the face--ugh!--green and ghastly, with unmoving
eyes that glimmered in the twilight like phosphorus. The dwarf carried
a keg, and on receiving an intimation, in a sign, that he would like Rip
to relieve him of it, that cheerful vagabond shouldered it and marched
on up the mountain.
At nightfall they emerged on a little plateau where a score of men in the
garb of long ago, with faces like that of Rip's guide, and equally still
and speechless, were playing bowls with great solemnity, the balls
sometimes rolling over the plateau's edge and rumbling down the rocks
with a boom like thunder. A cloaked and snowy-bearded figure,
watching aloof, turned like the others, and gazed uncomfortably at the
visitor who now came blundering in among them. Rip was at first for
making off, but the sinister glare in the circle of eyes took the run out
of his legs, and he was not displeased when they signed to him to tap
the keg and join in a draught of the ripest schnapps that ever he had
tasted,-- and he knew the flavor of every brand in Catskill. While these

strange men grew no more genial with passing of the flagons, Rip was
pervaded by a satisfying glow; then, overcome by sleepiness and
resting his head on a stone, he stretched his tired legs out and fell to
dreaming.
Morning. Sunlight and leaf shadow were dappled over the earth when
he awoke, and rising stiffly from his bed, with compunctions in his
bones, he reached for his gun. The already venerable implement was so
far gone with rot and rust that it fell to pieces in his hand, and looking
down at the fragments of it, he saw that his clothes were dropping from
his body in rags and mould, while a white beard flowed over his breast.
Puzzled and alarmed, shaking his head ruefully as he recalled the
carouse of the silent, he hobbled down the mountain as fast as he might
for the grip of the rheumatism on his knees and elbows, and entered his
native village. What! Was this Catskill? Was this the place that he left
yesterday? Had all these houses sprung up overnight, and these streets
been pushed across the meadows in a day? The people, too: where were
his friends? The children who had romped with him, the rotund topers
whom he had left cooling their hot noses in pewter pots at the tavern
door, the dogs that used to bark a welcome, recognizing in him a
kindred spirit of vagrancy: where were they?
And his wife, whose athletic arm and agile tongue had half disposed
him to linger in the mountains how happened it that she was not
awaiting him at the gate? But gate there was none in the familiar place:
an unfenced yard of weeds and ruined foundation wall were there. Rip's
home was gone. The idlers jeered at his bent, lean form, his snarl of
beard and hair, his disreputable dress, his look of grieved astonishment.
He stopped, instinctively, at the tavern, for he knew that place in spite
of its new sign: an officer in blue regimentals and a cocked hat
replacing the crimson George III. of