Nothing interrupted the stillness of the scene but the noise of the balls, which, whenever they were rolled, echoed along the mountains like rumbling peals of thunder."

Such was the company to whom hen-pecked Eip Van Winkle, wandering upon the mountains on a squirrel hunt, was introduced by a mysterious stranger carrying a keg of liquor, at autumnal twilight. And there it was that thirsty Rip drank copiously, went to sleep, and only awoke when twenty years had rolled away. His dog was gone, and his rusty gunbarrel, bereft of its stock, lay by his side. He doubted his identity. He sought the village tavern and its old frequenters ; his own house, and his faithful Wolf. Alas! everything was changed, except the river and the mountains. Only one thing gave him real joy -- Dame Van Winkle's

THE HUDSON. 155

terrible tongue had been silenced for ever by death ! He was a mystery to all, and more a mystery to himself than to others. Whom had he met in the mountains ? those queer fellows that reminded him of " the figures in an old Flemish painting, in the parlour of Dominic Van Schaick, the village parson. Sage Peter Vonderdonck was called to explain the mystery ; and Peter successfully responded. He asserted that it was a fact, handed down from his ancestor, the historian, that the Kaats-Kill Mountains had always been haunted by strange beings. That it was affirmed that the great Hendrick Hudson, the first discoverer of the river and country, kept a kind of vigil there every twenty years, with his crew of the Half-Moon, beiug permitted in this way to revisit the scenes of his enterprise, and kept a guardian eye upon the river and the great city called by his name. That his father had once seen them, in their old Dutch dresses, playing at nine-pins in a hollow of the mountain ; and that himself had heard, one summer afternoon, the sound of their balls, like distant peals of thunder." Rip's veracity was vindicated ; his daughter gave him a comfortable home ; and the grave historian of the event assures us that the Dutch inhabitants, "even to this day, never hear a thunder-storm of a summer afternoon about the Kaats-Kill, but they say, Hendrick Hudson and his crew are at their game of nine-pins."