One fine day, Rip Van Winkle sets out on a ramble in the Kaatskill Mountains, taking only his gun and his dog and feeling wonderfully free of his sharp-tongued, scolding wife. As the day draws to its close, Rip decides, reluctantly, that he had best turn for home, but as he begins to descend the mountain, he hears a voice calling his name. Then he sees an odd figure climbing slowly toward him. It is a man carrying a heavy keg on his back. Rip does not recognize this man, and in fact, he is dressed strangely and archaically in an “antique Dutch fashion.”
Rip, as is typical of him, hurries forward to help the man, and they carry the keg up the mountain. As they climb, Rip thinks he hears rumbles of thunder. The strange, silent man leads Rip into a hollow, and Rip sees several other “odd-looking personages...
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playing at nine-pins.” They, too, are dressed in old-fashioned clothes, and they are silent and grave in spite of their game. Rip helps serve the contents of the keg to the company, and then he tastes a bit of the liquor himself. He finds it an excellent drink and takes a bit more, then a bit more yet, and
at length his senses were overpowered, his eyes swam in his head, his head gradually declined, and he fell into a deep sleep.
When Rip awakens, the whole world has changed, for he has slept for twenty years. The Revolutionary War has taken place; his wife and many of his friends and neighbors have passed on; his children are grown; and Rip himself is an old man. Old Peter Vanderdonk has an explanation. Every twenty years, he says, Hendrick Hudson and the crew of the Half-moon revisit the country they discovered so long ago. These ghosts from the past play at ninepins on the mountain, and Peter thinks old Rip must have fallen in with them. Rip resigns himself quickly to his fate, and he settles in with his daughter and her family, quite happy that his scolding wife is gone.