Behind the New Grand Hotel, in the Catskills, is an amphitheatre of mountain
that is held to be the place of which the Mohicans spoke when they told of
people there who worked in metals, and had bushy beards and eyes like pigs. From
the smoke of their forges, in autumn, came the haze of Indian summer; and when
the moon was full, it was their custom to assemble on the edge of a precipice
above the hollow and dance and caper until the night was nigh worn away. They
brewed a liquor that had the effect of shortening the bodies and swelling the
heads of all who drank it, and when Hudson and his crew visited the mountains,
the pygmies held a carouse in his honor and invited him to drink their liquor.
The crew went away, shrunken and distorted by the magic distillation, and thus
it was that Rip Van Winkle found them on the
eve of his famous sleep.
