As he rose to walk, he found himself stiff in the joints, and
wanting in his usual activity. "These mountain beds do not agree
with me," thought Rip, "and if this frolic, should lay me up with
a fit of the rheumatism, I shall have a blessed time with Dame
Van Winkle." With some difficulty he got down into the glen: he
found the gully up which he and his companion had ascended the
preceding evening; but to his astonishment a mountain stream was
now foaming down it, leaping from rock to rock, and filling the
glen with babbling murmurs. He, however, made shift to scramble
up its sides, working his toilsome way through thickets of birch,
sassafras, and witch-hazel; and sometimes tripped up or entangled
by the wild grape vines that twisted their coils and tendrils
from tree to tree, and spread a kind of network in his path.
At length he reached to where the ravine had opened through the
cliffs to the amphitheatre; but no traces of such opening
remained. The rocks presented a high impenetrable wall, over
which the torrent came tumbling in a sheet of feathery foam, and
fell into a broad deep basin, black from the shadows of the
surrounding forest. Here, then, poor Rip was brought to a stand.
He again called and whistled after his dog; he was only answered
by the cawing of a flock of idle crows, sporting high in the air
about a dry tree that overhung a sunny precipice; and who, secure
in their elevation, seemed to look down and scoff at the poor
man's perplexities.
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