"And in the meantime the rest of us can, perhaps, be depended upon to entertain your young laddie, Cousin Violet," said Mr. Lilburn, with a kindly, amused look at Ned.
"I see that, as usual, you have the Dolphin lying here at your dock, father," said Max, "and I suppose that you all take occasional trips in her."
"Yes, son, and I think you will not object to accompanying us in that, will you?"
"Oh, no, sir; no, indeed; I shall be very glad to do so, as babies and all can be made as comfortable there as anywhere on land."
"By the way," said Dr. Harold, "a lady patient was telling me the other day of a visit she had paid to the village of Catskill, interested in it because of having seen Joseph Jefferson playing 'Rip Van Winkle,' and that has given me a desire to see the place."
"So you shall," said the captain; "the Dolphin can readily be persuaded to make that trip, and I presume none of our party would object to going there in her."
He sent a smiling glance around as he spoke, and it was responded to by smiles and exclamations of pleasure in the prospect.
"I don't know anything about Rip Van Winkle," said Elsie, turning toward her father. "Is it a story, papa, and will you tell me about it?"
"Yes, daughter," he replied; "it is a story and only a story; not fact at all, but seeming so real as played by Jefferson that very many people were and are greatly interested in it. Rip Van Winkle is represented as an ignorant, good-natured man, made and kept poor by love of liquor, which so soured his wife against him that she drove him out of the house. Once it was at night and in a terrible thunder storm. He goes into a steep and rocky clove in the Kaatskill Mountains, and meets with some queer, silent people, who give him drinks of liquor that put him to sleep, and he does not wake again for twenty years, and in that time he had changed from a comparatively young man to a feeble, old one with white hair and a long white beard. In the meantime his wife, thinking him dead, had married the man—Derrick by name—who had stolen his house and land. She had done it in order to keep herself and little daughter from starvation, and he was now trying to force little Meenie, Rip's daughter, to marry his nephew, Cookles, though she did not want him, as she loved another, young Hendrick, who was her playmate when they were children, but is now a sailor and away on his vessel—has been gone five years—but now he comes back just in time to put a stop to the mischief Derrick and his nephew, Cookles, are trying to do to Meenie and Gretchen in order to get full possession of the house and land. He and Rip are able to prove that those, the house and land, are not his and never were.