The Maccabaean

Visitors in the Catskills usually remark how faithfully the atmosphere of the locality was caught by Washington Irving. The inference seems natural that he meant his Rip Van Winkle to be a personification of the spirit that broods over the hills. Rip’s long sleep was the dozing of the mountains humanly expressed. It is said that the descendants of the historic Rip partake of his sympathetic disposition, and that there has been in every generation a representative of the line snoring twenty years, somewhere in the folds of the hills, who, in due time, awakens to find the tale of history at an advanced chapter, and his heir and counterpart grow up, ready to repeat the sire’s performance. The evidence for the unbroken succession of Rips so infallibly sensitive to the soporific Catskills, is not of a strictly scientific character, but up to the present, no one has risen to question the fact that the last Rip awoke from his sleep on the 30th of June, 1907, in Kaaterskill Cove, or that in the village of Tannersville, whither he made his way, he beheld the scenes and incidents which it is the purpose of the present historian to record.

The scion of the house of Van Winkle awoke about the time of sunset, and darkness had fallen when the road along which he was shuffling became the village of Tannersville. He crossed some railroad tracks, which gave him the impression that he was somewhere in the Hudson Valley, for at the period when he had fallen asleep there had been no railroad on the heights. A little farther on he came to a cluster of brightly lighted stores. The inscriptions on the windows aroused in him conflicting feelings. The words seemed to be English, and yet there was something subtly foreign about them. On one window he read, “Drugs and Toilet Articles. M. Abramson”; on another “Stationery, Souvenirs, J. Hymans.” He passed a barber’s pole, which caused him instinctively to raise his hand toward his chin, where the long beard hung, so novel to his’ touch. Turning to the window, he read: “New York Barber, I. Goldstein.” Rip’s still

dormant intellect struggled in vain with the phenomenon before him. The sign across the road from the barber shop was entirely incam- prehensible. It read: “Delicatessen, A. Simon.” “That surely must be French,” thought Rip, “but how can it be?’ And he put his hand in alarm to his forehead. The store next to the one bearing the unintelligible words had a large porch with a plow and a few hoes and spades upon it. Joy shot through Rip as he read, “Hardware, Peter Avery & Son” A mist seemed to have lifted from his mind. But his perplexity returned a moment later when, looking across at a butcher’s shop, he saw under the familiar words “Meat Market,” an inscription that he was sure he had never seen the like of before. Rip had never been much of a philologist, but he knew vaguely that antiquities existed, and he felt for some inexplicable reason that the hieroglyphic confronting him was one of those. There was printed on the window, besides the words already mentioned, the name “Isaac Shapinsky,” and inside the shop Rip saw a black-bearded man hold a fowl upside down while he conversed with a couple of women.

Rip would gladiy have made inquiries in the hardware store, but his extraordinary appearance, of which he was now fully aware, prevented him. He moved on past the rows of illuminated stores into the darkness, where only here and there were visible the faint lights of cottages.. The evening was pleasant and the hum of conversation was audible from many of the verandas. Rip caught words here and there, but he thought his hearing must have been affected, for the language sounded as if the speakers uttered much of it from the depths of their throats. He saw one couple, man and wife apparently, playing cards, while a nurse was trying to still the clamor of a child. Strange to say, although he had but a few hours before risen from a twenty years’ sleep, Rip began to feel his eyelids droop and his feet drag more heavily as the night, wore on. At length he espied a little church and with a sigh of relief, he stretched