Rip Van Winkle

: THE HUDSON AND ITS HILLS
: Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land

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 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.