Folktale Week Day 2: Magic

It was on a September evening, during a jaunt on South Mountain, that Rip Van Winkle met a stubby, silent man, of goodly girth, his round head topped with a steeple hat, and the face—ugh!—green and ghastly, with unmoving eyes that glimmered in the twilight like phosphorus. The dwarf carried a keg that he wanted Rip to relieve him of, that cheerful vagabond shouldered it and marched on up the mountain.

At nightfall they emerged on a little plateau where a score of men in the garb of long ago, with faces like that of Rip’s guide, were playing bowls with great solemnity, the balls sometimes rolling over the plateau’s edge and rumbling down the rocks with a boom like thunder. Rip at first planned to make off, but he was not displeased when they signed to him to tap the keg and join in a draught of the ripest schnapps that ever he had tasted,—and he knew the flavor of every brand in Catskill. While these strange men grew no more genial with passing of the flagons, Rip was pervaded by a satisfying glow; then, overcome by sleepiness and resting his head on a stone, he stretched his tired legs out and fell to dreaming.