ould lay me up with a fit of rheumatism, I shall have a
blessed time with Dame Van Winkle." With some difficulty he got down
into the glen: he found the gully up which he and his companion had
ascended the preceding evening; but to his astonishment a mountain
stream was now foaming down it, leaping from rock to rock, and filling
the glen with babbling murmurs. He, however, made shift to scramble up
its sides, working his toilsome way through thickets of birch,
sassafras, and witch-hazel, and sometimes tripped up or entangled by
the wild grapevines that twisted their coils or tendrils from tree to
tree, and spread a kind of network in his path.

At length he reached to where the ravine had opened through the cliffs
to the amphitheatre; but no traces of such opening remained. The rocks
presented a high impenetrable wall over which the torrent came tumbling
in a sheet of feathery foam, and fell into a broad deep basin, black
from the shadows of the surrounding forest. Here, then, poor Rip was
brought to a stand. He again called and whistled after his dog; he was
only answered by the cawing of a flock of idle crows, sporting high in
air about a dry tree that overhung a sunny precipice; and who, secure in
their elevation, seemed to look down and scoff at the poor man's
perplexities. What was to be done? the morning was passing away, and Rip
felt famished for want of his breakfast. He grieved to give up his dog
and gun; he dreaded to meet his wife; but it would not do to starve
among the mountains. He shook his head, shouldered the rusty firelock,
and, with a heart full of trouble and anxiety, turned his steps
homeward.

As he approached the village he met a number of people, but none whom he
knew, which somewhat surprised him, for he had thought himself
acquainted with every one in the country round. Their dress, too, was of
a different fashion from that to which he was accustomed. They all
stared at him with equal marks of surprise, and whenever they cast their
eyes upon him, invariably stroked their chins. The constant recurrence
of this gesture induced Rip, involuntarily, to do the same, when, to his
astonishment, he found his beard had grown a foot long!

He had now entered the skirts of the village. A troop of strange
children ran at his heels, hooting after him, and pointing at his gray
beard. The dogs, too, not one of which he recognized for an old
acquaintance, barked at him as he passed. The very village was alter