"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