He determined to revisit the scene of the last evening's gambol, and
if he met with any of the party, to demand his dog and gun. 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 grapevines that twisted their
coils or 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.
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