THE CHIMÆRA
White, fleecy clouds were hanging in the air, and threw the dark spots of their shadow here and there over the landscape. But, by and by, the sunshine was where the shadow had been, and the shadow was somewhere else.
Far to the westward was a range of blue mountains, which Eustace Bright told the children were the Catskills. Among those misty hills, he said, was a spot where some old Dutchmen were playing an everlasting game of nine-pins, and where an idle fellow, whose name was Rip Van Winkle, had fallen asleep, and slept twenty years at a stretch. The children eagerly besought Eustace to tell them all about this wonderful affair. But the student replied that the story had been told once already, and better than it ever could be told again; and that nobody would have a right to alter a word of it, until it should have grown as old as ‘The Gorgon’s Head,’ and ‘The Three Golden Apples,’ and the rest of those miraculous legends.
‘At least,’ said Periwinkle, ‘while we rest ourselves here, and are looking about us, you can tell us another of your own stories.’
‘Yes, Cousin Eustace,’ cried Primrose, ‘I advise you to tell us a story here. Take some lofty subject or other, and see if your imagination will not come up to it. Perhaps the mountain air may make you poetical, for once. And no matter how strange and wonderful the story may be, now that we are up among the clouds, we can believe anything.’
‘Can you believe,’ asked Eustace, ‘that there was once a winged horse?’
‘Yes,’ said saucy Primrose; ‘but I am afraid you will never be able to catch him.’
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