e there in search of some of his neighbors, who used to keep
about the tavern.

"Well--who are they?--name them."

Rip bethought himself a moment, and inquired, "Where's Nicholas
Vedder?"

There was a silence for a little while, when an old man replied, in a
thin piping voice, "Nicholas Vedder! why, he is dead and gone these
eighteen years! There was a wooden tombstone in the churchyard that
used to tell all about him, but that's rotten and gone too."

"Where's Brom Dutcher?"

"Oh, he went off to the army in the beginning of the war; some say he
was killed at the storming of Stony Point--others say he was drowned
in a squall at the foot of Antony's Nose. I don't know--he never came
back again."

"Where's Van Bummel, the schoolmaster?"

"He went off to the wars too, was a great militia general, and is now
in Congress."

Rip's heart died away at hearing of these sad changes in his home and
friends, and finding himself thus alone in the world. Every answer
puzzled him too, by treating of such enormous lapses of time, and of
matters which he could not understand: war--Congress--Stony Point; he
had no courage to ask after any more friends, but cried out in
despair, "Does nobody here know Rip Van Winkle?"

"Oh, Rip Van Winkle!" exclaimed two or three--"oh, to be sure! that's
Rip Van Winkle yonder, leaning against the tree."

Rip looked, and beheld a precise counterpart of himself, as he went up
the mountain: apparently as lazy, and certainly as ragged. The poor
fellow was now completely confounded. He doubted his own identity, and
whether he was himself or another man. In the midst of his
bewilderment, the man in the cocked hat demanded who he was, and what
was his name?

"God knows," exclaimed he, at his wit's end; "I'm not myself--I'm
somebody else--that's me yonder--no--that's somebody else got into my
shoes--I was myself last night, but I fell asleep on the mountain, and
they've changed my gun, and everything's changed, and I'm changed, and
I can't tell what's my name, or who I am!"

The bystanders began now to look at each other, nod, wink
significantly, and tap their fingers against their foreheads. There
was a whisper, also, about securing the gun, and keeping the old
fellow from doing mischief, at the very suggestion of which the
self-important man in the cocked hat retired with some precipitation.
At this critical moment a fresh comely woman prest through the throng
to get a peep at the gray-bearded