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.

CATSKILL GNOMES

Behind the New Grand Hotel, in the Catskills, is an amphitheatre of
mountain that is held to be the place of which the Mohicans spoke when
they told of people there who worked in metals, and had bushy beards and
eyes like pigs. From the smoke of their forges, in autumn, came the haze
of Indian summer; and when the moon was full, it was their custom to
assemble on the edge of a precipice above the hollow and dance and caper
until the night was nigh worn away. They brewed a liquor that had the
effect of shortening the bodies and swelling the heads of all who drank
it, and when Hudson and his crew visited the mountains, the pygmies held
a carouse in his honor and invited him to drink their liquor. The crew
went away, shrunken and distorted by the magic distillation, and thus it
was that Rip Van Winkle found them on the eve of his famous sleep.

THE CATSKILL WITCH

When the Dutch gave the name of Katzbergs to the mountains west of the
Hudson, by reason of the