Almost all nations have a tradition about some sleeper, who will wake after a long period of dormancy. Of these the best known to us is Rip Van Winkle, who, according to the legend (Washington Irving's version), was a Dutch colonist of New York, who met a strange man in a ravine of the Kaatskill Mountains. Rip helped the stranger to carry a keg to a wild glen among rocks, where he saw a host of strange personages playing skittles in mysterious silence. Rip took the first opportunity of tasting the keg, fell into a stupor and slept for twenty years. On waking he found that his wife was dead and buried, his daughter married, his village remodelled, and America had become independent.

Epimenides the Gnostic slept for fifty-seven years.

Nourjahad, wife of the Mogul emperor Geangir, who discovered the otto of roses, slept seven years.

Gyneth slept five hundred years, by the enchantment of Merlin.

The seven sleepers slept for two hundred and fifty years in Mt. Celion.

St. David slept for seven years.

The following are not dead, but only sleep till the fullness of their respective times: Elijah, Endymion, Merlin, King Arthur, Charlemagne, Frederick Barbarossa and his knights, the three Tells, Desmond of Kil-mallock, Thomas of Erceldoune, Bobadil el Chico, Brian Boroimhe, Knez Lazar, King Sebastian of Portugal, Olaf Tryggvason, the French slain in the Sicilian Vespers, and one or two others.