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