the most weird and interesting, of
these stories belong to a type which we may call, after the famous
Posthumous Writing of Diedrich Knickerbocker, the "Rip van Winkle type."
Here the hero remains under the spell of the supernatural until he
passes the ordinary term of life; and he comes back to find all his
friends dead and himself nothing but a dim memory. It will be needless
here to recapitulate the tale of Rip van Winkle himself. Whether any
such legend really lingers about the Kaatskill mountains I do not know;
but I have a vehement suspicion that Washington Irving was indebted
rather to Otmar's "Traditions of the Harz," a book published at Bremen
in the year 1800. In this book the scene of the tale is laid on the
Kyffhaeuser, and with the exception of such embellishments as the keen
tongue of Dame van Winkle and a few others, the incidents in the
adventures of Peter Claus the Goatherd are absolutely the same as those
of Rip van Winkle.[136]

Of all the variants of this type it is in China that we find the one
most resembling it. Wang Chih, afterwards one of the holy men of the
Taoists, wandering one day in the mountains of Kue Chow to gather
firewood, entered a grotto in which some aged men were playing at chess.
He laid down his axe and watched their game, in the course of which one
of them handed him something in size and shape like a date-stone,
telling him to put it into his mouth. No sooner had he done so than
hunger and thirst passed away. After some time had elapsed one of the
players said: "It is long since you came here; you should go home now."
Wang Chih accordingly proceeded to pick up his axe, but found that its
handle had mouldered into dust; and on reaching home he became aware
that not hours, nor days, but centuries had passed since he left it, and
that no vestige of his kinsfolk remained. Another legend tells of a
horseman who, riding over the hills, sees several old men playing a game
with rushes. He ties his horse to a tree while he looks on at them. In a
few minutes, as it seems to him, he turns to depart; but his horse is
already a skeleton, and of the saddle and bridle rotten pieces only are
left. He seeks his home; but that too is gone; and he lies down and dies
broken-hearted. A similar story is told in Japan of a man who goes into
the mountains to cut wood, and watches two mysterious ladies playing at
chess while seven generations of mortal men pass away. Both these
legends omit the superna