Rip Van Winkle is an amiable farmer who wanders into the Catskill Mountains, where he comes upon a group of dwarfs playing ninepins. Rip accepts their offer of a drink of liquor and promptly falls asleep. When he awakens, after sleeping for 20 years, he is an old man with a long white beard; the dwarfs are nowhere in sight. When Rip returns to town, he finds that everything is changed: his wife is dead, his children are grown, and George Washington’s portrait hangs in place of King George III’s. The old man entertains the townspeople with tales of the old days and of his encounter with the little men in the mountains.

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica