Myths and Legends of Our Own Land | Page 4

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 his recollection, and labelled
"General Washington." There was a quick gathering of ne'er-do-weels,
of tavern-haunters and gaping 'prentices, about him, and though their
faces were strange and their manners rude, he made bold to ask if they
knew such and such of his friends.
"Nick Vedder? He's dead and gone these eighteen years." "Brom
Dutcher? He joined the army and was killed at Stony Point." "Van
Brummel? He, too, went to the war, and is in Congress now."
And Rip Van Winkle?"
"Yes, he's here. That's him yonder."
And to Rip's utter confusion he saw before him a counterpart of himself,
as young, lazy, ragged, and easy-natured as he remembered himself to
be, yesterday--or, was it yesterday?
"That's young Rip," continued his informer. "His father was Rip Van
Winkle, too, but he went to the mountains twenty years ago and never
came back. He probably fell over a cliff, or was carried off by Indians,
or eaten by bears."
Twenty years ago! Truly, it was so. Rip had slept for twenty years
without awaking. He had left a peaceful colonial village; he returned to
a bustling republican town. How he eventually found, among the oldest
inhabitants, some who admitted that they knew him; how he found a
comfortable home with his married daughter and the son who took after
him so kindly; how he recovered from the effect of the tidings that his
wife had died of apoplexy, in a quarrel; how he resumed his seat at the
tavern tap and smoked long pipes and told long yarns for the rest of his
days, were matters of record up to the beginning of this century.
And a strange story Rip had to tell, for he had served as cup-bearer to
the dead crew of the Half Moon. He had quaffed a cup of Hollands with
no other than Henry Hudson himself. Some say that Hudson's spirit has
made its home amid these hills, that it may look into the lovely valley
that he discovered; but others hold that every twenty years he and his
men assemble for a revel in the mountains that so charmed them when
first seen swelling against the western heavens, and the liquor they
drink on this night has the bane of throwing any mortal who lips it into
a slumber whence nothing can arouse him until the day dawns when the

crew shall meet again. As you climb the east front of the mountains by
the old carriage road, you pass, half-way up the height, the stone that
Rip Van Winkle slept on, and may see that it is slightly hollowed by his
form. The ghostly revellers are due in the Catskills in 1909, and let all
tourists who are among the mountains in September of that year beware
of accepting liquor from strangers.

CATSKILL GNOMES
Behind the New Grand Hotel, in the Catskills, is an amphitheatre of
mountain that is held to be the place of which the Mohicans spoke
when they told of people there who worked in metals, and had bushy
beards and eyes like pigs. From the smoke of their forges, in autumn,
came the haze of Indian summer; and when the moon was full, it was
their custom to assemble on the edge of a precipice above the hollow
and dance and caper until the night was nigh worn away. They brewed
a liquor that had the effect of shortening the bodies and swelling the
heads of all who drank it, and when Hudson and his crew visited the
mountains, the pygmies held a carouse in his honor and invited him to
drink their liquor. The crew went away, shrunken and distorted by the
magic distillation, and thus it was that Rip Van Winkle found them on
the eve of his famous sleep.

THE CATSKILL WITCH
When the Dutch gave the name of Katzbergs to the mountains west of
the Hudson, by reason of the wild-cats and panthers that ranged there,
they obliterated the beautiful Indian Ontiora, "mountains of the sky." In
one tradition of the red men these hills were bones of a monster that fed
on human beings until the Great Spirit turned it into stone as it was
floundering toward the ocean to bathe. The two lakes near the summit
were its eyes. These peaks were the home of an Indian witch, who
adjusted the weather for the Hudson Valley with the certainty of a
signal service bureau. It was she who let out the day and night in
blessed alternation, holding back the one