meant no harm, but merely came there in
search of some of his neighbors, who used to keep about the tavern.

"Well--who are they?--name them."

Rip bethought himself a moment, and inquired, "Where's Nicholas Vedder?"

There was a silence for a little while, when an old man replied, in a
thin piping voice, "Nicholas Vedder! why, he is dead and gone these
eighteen years! There was a wooden tombstone in the church-yard that
used to tell all about him, but that's rotten and gone too."

"Where's Brom Dutcher?"

"Oh, he went off to the army in the beginning of the war; some say he
was killed at the storming of Stony Point--others say he was drowned in
a squall at the foot of Antony's Nose. I don't know---he never came back
again."

"Where's Van Bummel, the schoolmaster?"

"He went off to the wars too, was a great militia general, and is now in
congress."

Rip's heart died away at hearing of these sad changes in his home and
friends, and finding himself thus alone in the world. Every answer
puzzled him, too, by treating of such enormous lapses of time, and of
matters which he could not understand: war--congress--Stony Point;--he
had no courage to ask after any more friends, but cried out in despair,
"Does nobody here know Rip Van Winkle?"

"Oh, Rip Van Winkle!" exclaimed two or three. "Oh, to be sure! that's
Rip Van Winkle yonder, leaning against the tree."

Rip looked, and beheld a precise counterpart of himself, as he went up
the mountain; apparently as lazy, and certainly as ragged. The poor
fellow was now completely confounded. He doubted his own identity, and
whether he was himself or another man. In the midst of his bewilderment,
the man in the cocked hat demanded who he was, and what was his name?

"God knows," exclaimed he, at his wit's end; "I'm not myself--I'm
somebody else--that's me yonder--no--that's somebody else got into my
shoes--I was myself last night, but I fell asleep on the mountain, and
they've changed my gun, and every thing's changed, and I'm changed, and
I can't tell what's my name, or who I am!"

The by-standers began now to look at each other, nod, wink
significantly, and tap their fingers against their foreheads. There was
a whisper, also, about securing the gun, and keeping the old fellow from
doing mischief, at the very suggestion of which the self-important man
in the cocked hat retired with some precipitation. At this critical
moment a fresh comely woman pressed through the throng