Rip Van Winkle

Rip Van Winkle, the hero of Washington Irving's delightful sketch (1820), an idle, good-natured, henpecked scapegrace, who neglects—he cannot be said to cultivate it—a patch of maize and potatoes in a small village near the Hudson River, and who, with his gun and dog Wolf, his companion in idleness, seeks a refuge from the scolding tongue of his sorely-tried but termagant wife in the forests of the Catskill Mountains. There he falls in with Hendrick Hudson and his crew of the Half Moon, who are playing at ninepins in a secluded hollow, the balls as they roll echoing along the mountains like rumbling peals of thunder. Rip is directed to wait on them, and while doing so tastes and returns to the liquor he hands, till his senses forsake him. He awakens on a bright summer morning, his dog gone, and a rusty firelock by his side; his beard has grown a foot long, and in the village he finds new buildings, new names over the doors, new faces at the windows. His own house is fallen into decay, his wife is dead—there is a drop of comfort, at least, in this intelligence—and he who went away a subject of George the Third has returned to find himself a free citizen of the United States. His sleep, he discovers, has lasted twenty years, and meantime the American Revolution has passed and left all things changed. Rip, however, is recognised by some of his old cronies, finds a home at his daughter's house, and for many more years is as comfortable at the door of the new wooden Union Hotel as ever he was at old Nicholas Vedder's quiet Dutch inn. The story has been often dramatised in America, but no version has held the stage except Boucicault's (1865), with which the name of Joseph Jefferson is identified. The opera by Planquette (1882) also deserves mention, as keeping pretty closely to the story.