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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 mold, 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. 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.
The idlers jeered at his bent, lean form, his snarl of beard and hair, his disreputable dress, his look of grieved astonishment. He joined the army and was killed at Stony Point. He, too, went to the war, and is in Congress now. 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. 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 children especially love the fanciful stories he tells. One day, Rip wanders off into the woods to escape his nagging wife. Hearing thunder, he unwittingly follows the ghosts of Henry Hudson's men deep into the wilderness. As the men play nine-pins, Rip imbibes a "magic potion" - quietly falling into a deep sleep. He wakens 20 years later, his beard grown long and his beloved dog, Wolf, nowhere to be found.
Rip makes his way back into the village and discovers that the American Revolution has taken place. He is no longer recognizable, nor does he know any of the townspeople who greet him. Rip's luck holds out and it isn't long before he finds his place among his grown children — though much of his family has passed on — and resumes his habitual idleness.
His tale is repeated and solemnly taken to heart by hen-pecked husbands who wish they could have shared in Rip's good fortune and slept through the atrocities of war.
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