【正文】 ed them, they suddenly desisted from their play, and stared at him with such fixed statuelike gaze, and such strange, uncouth, lackluster countenances, that his heart turned within him, and his knees smote together. His panion now emptied the contents of the keg into large flagons, and made signs to him to wait upon the pany. He obeyed with fear and trembling。 but never mind, my lad, while I live thou shalt never want a friend to stand by thee!” Wolf would wag his tail, look wistfully in his master’s face, and if dogs can feel pity, I verily believe he reciprocated the sentiment with all his heart.In a long ramble of the kind on a fine autumnal day, Rip had unconsciously scrambled to one of the highest parts of the Catskill Mountains. He was after his favorite sport of squirrel shooting, and the still solitudes had echoed and re235。 for Dame Van Winkle regarded them as panions in idleness, and even looked upon Wolf with an evil eye, as the cause of his master’s so often going astray. True it is, in all points of spirit befitting an honorable dog, he was as courageous an animal as ever scoured the woods—but what courage can withstand the everduring and allbesetting terrors of a woman’s tongue? The moment Wolf entered the house his crest fell, his tail drooped to the ground, or curled between his legs。 it was the most pestilent little piece of ground in the whole country。 he was, moreover, a kind neighbor and an obedient, henpecked husband. Indeed, to the latter circumstance might be owing that meekness of spirit which gained him such universal popularity。Rip Van Winkle A Posthumous Writing of Diedrich Knickerbocker By Washington Irving(THE FOLLOWING tale was found among the papers of the late Diedrich Knickerbocker, an old gentleman of New York, who was very curious in the Dutch history of the province, and the manners of the descendants from its primitive settlers. His historical researches, however, did not lie so much among books as among men。produce作者簡介： 華盛頓to溫克爾》便是摘自《見聞札記》。 but sometimes, when the rest of the landscape is cloudless, they will gather a hood of gray vapors about their summits, which, in the last rays of the setting sun, will glow and light up like a crown of glory.At the foot of these fairy mountains the voyager may have descried the light smoke curling up from a village whose shingle roofs gleam among the trees, just where the blue tints of the upland melt away into the fresh green of the nearer landscape. It is a little village of great antiquity, having been founded by some of the Dutch colonists, in the early times of the province, just about the beginning of the government of the good Peter Stuyvesant (may he rest in peace!), and there were some of the houses of the original settlers standing within a few years, with lattice windows, gable fronts surmounted with weathercocks, and built of small yellow bricks brought from Holland.In that same village, and in one of these very houses (which, to tell the precise truth, was sadly timeworn and weatherbeaten), there lived many years since, while the country was yet a province of Great Britain, a simple, goodnatured fellow, of the name of Rip Van Winkle. He was a descendant of the Van Winkles who figured so gallantly in the chivalrous days of Peter Stuyvesant, and acpanied him to the siege of Fort Christina. He inherited, however, but little of the martial character of his ancestors. I have observed that he was a simple, goodnatured man。 In fact, he declared it was of no use to work on his farm。 but his wife kept continually dinning in his ears about his idleness, his carelessness, and the ruin he was bringing on his family. Morning, noon, and night, her tongue was incessantly going, and everything he said or did was sure to produce a torrent of household eloquence. Rip had but one way of replying to all lectures of the kind, and that, by frequent use, had grown into a habit. He shrugged his shoulders, shook his head, cast up his eyes, but said nothing. This, however, always provoked a fresh volley from his wife, so that he was fain to draw off his forces, and take to the outside of the house—the only side which, in truth, belongs to a henpecked husband.Rip’s sole domestic adherent was his dog Wolf, who was as much henpecked as his master。 and his only alternative, to escape from the labor of the farm and clamor of his wife, was to take gun in hand and stroll away into the woods. Here he would sometimes seat himself at the foot of a tree, and share the contents of his wallet with Wolf, with whom he sympathized as a fellowsufferer in persecution. “Poor Wolf,” he would say, “thy mistress leads thee a dog’s life of it。 the face of another seemed to consist entirely of nose, and was surmounted by a white sugarloaf hat set off with a little red cock’s tail. They all had beards, of various shapes and colors. There was one who seemed to be the mander. He was a stout old gentleman, with a weatherbeaten countenance。 he was only answered by the cawing of a flock of idle crows, sporting high in air about a dry tree that overhung a sunny precipice。 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 then inquired, “Where’s Nicholas Vedder?”There was 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 churchyard that used to tell all about him, but that’s rotted and gone, too.”“Where’s Brom Dutcher?”“Oh, he went off to the army in the beginning of the war。 he doubted whether both he and the world around him were not bewitched. Surely this was his native village, which he had left but the day before. There stood the Catskill Mountains—there ran the silver Hudson at a distance—there was every hill and dale precisely as it had always been—Rip was sorely perplexe