THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW
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THE LEGEND OF
SLEEPY HOLLOW
by Washington Irving
THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW
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Found among the papers of the late Diedrech Knickerbocker.
A pleasing land of drowsy head it was, Of dreams that wave before the
half-shut eye; And of gay castles in the clouds that pass, Forever flushing
round a summer sky. Castle of Indolence.
In the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern
shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion of the river denominated by
the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee, and where they always
prudently shortened sail and implored the protection of St. Nicholas when
they crossed, there lies a small market town or rural port, which by some
is called Greensburgh, but which is more generally and properly known by
the name of Tarry Town. This name was given, we are told, in former days,
by the good housewives of the adjacent country, from the inveterate
propensity of their husbands to linger about the village tavern on market
days. Be that as it may, I do not vouch for the fact, but merely advert to it,
for the sake of being precise and authentic. Not far from this village,
perhaps about two miles, there is a little valley or rather lap of land among
high hills, which is one of the quietest places in the whole world. A small
brook glides through it, with just murmur enough to lull one to repose; and
the occasional whistle of a quail or tapping of a woodpecker is almost the
only sound that ever breaks in upon the uniform tranquillity.
I recollect that, when a stripling, my first exploit in squirrel-shooting
was in a grove of tall walnut-trees that shades one side of the valley. I had
wandered into it at noontime, when all nature is peculiarly quiet, and was
startled by the roar of my own gun, as it broke the Sabbath stillness around
and was prolonged and reverberated by the angry echoes. If ever I should
wish for a retreat whither I might steal from the world and its distractions,
and dream quietly away the remnant of a troubled life, I know of none
more promising than this little valley.
From the listless repose of the place, and the peculiar character of its
inhabitants, who are descendants from the original Dutch settlers, this
sequestered glen has long been known by the name of SLEEPY
HOLLOW, and its rustic lads are called the Sleepy Hollow Boys
throughout all the neighboring country. A drowsy, dreamy influence seems
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to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere. Some say that
the place was bewitched by a High German doctor, during the early days
of the settlement; others, that an old Indian chief, the prophet or wizard of
his tribe, held his powwows there before the country was discovered by
Master Hendrick Hudson. Certain it is, the place still continues under the
sway of some witching power, that holds a spell over the minds of the
good people, causing them to walk in a continual reverie. They are given
to all kinds of marvelous beliefs; are subject to trances and visions, and
frequently see strange sights, and hear music and voices in the air. The
whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight
superstitions; stars shoot and meteors glare oftener across the valley than
in any other part of the country, and the nightmare, with her whole
ninefold, seems to make it the favorite scene of her gambols.
The dominant spirit, however, that haunts this enchanted region, and
seems to be commander-in-chief of all the powers of the air, is the
apparition of a figure on horseback, without a head. It is said by some to
be the ghost of a Hessian trooper, whose head had been carried away by a
cannon-ball, in some nameless battle during the Revolutionary War, and
who is ever and anon seen by the country folk hurrying along in the gloom
of night, as if on the wings of the wind. His haunts are not confined to the
valley, but extend at times to the adjacent roads, and especially to the
vicinity of a church at no great distance. Indeed, certain of the most
authentic historians of those parts, who have been careful in collecting and
collating the floating facts concerning this spectre, allege that the body of
the trooper having been buried in the churchyard, the ghost rides forth to
the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head, and that the rushing speed
with which he sometimes passes along the Hollow, like a midnight blast, is
owing to his being belated, and in a hurry to get back to the churchyard
before daybreak.
Such is the general purport of this legendary superstition, which has
furnished materials for many a wild story in that region of shadows; and
the spectre is known at all the country firesides, by the name of the
Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow.
It is remarkable that the visionary propensity I have mentioned is not
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confined to the native inhabitants of the valley, but is unconsciously
imbibed by every one who resides there for a time. However wide awake
they may have been before they entered that sleepy region, they are sure,
in a little time, to inhale the witching influence of the air, and begin to
grow imaginative, to dream dreams, and see apparitions.
I mention this peaceful spot with all possible laud for it is in such
little retired Dutch valleys, found here and there embosomed in the great
State of New York, that population, manners, and customs remain fixed,
while the great torrent of migration and improvement, which is making
such incessant changes in other parts of this restless country, sweeps by
them unobserved. They are like those little nooks of still water, which
border a rapid stream, where we may see the straw and bubble riding
quietly at anchor, or slowly revolving in their mimic harbor, undisturbed
by the rush of the passing current. Though many years have elapsed since
I trod the drowsy shades of Sleepy Hollow, yet I question whether I should
not still find the same trees and the same families vegetating in its
sheltered bosom.
In this by-place of nature there abode, in a remote period of American
history, that is to say, some thirty years since, a worthy wight of the name
of Ichabod Crane, who sojourned, or, as he expressed it, "tarried," in
Sleepy Hollow, for the purpose of instructing the children of the vicinity.
He was a native of Connecticut, a State which supplies the Union with
pioneers for the mind as well as for the forest, and sends forth yearly its
legions of frontier woodmen and country schoolmasters. The cognomen of
Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He was tall, but exceedingly
lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile
out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole
frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with
huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked
like a weather-cock perched upon his spindle neck to tell which way the
wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day,
with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have
mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some
scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.
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His schoolhouse was a low building of one large room, rudely
constructed of logs; the windows partly glazed, and partly patched with
leaves of old copybooks. It was most ingeniously secured at vacant hours,
by a *withe twisted in the handle of the door, and stakes set against the
window shutters; so that though a thief might get in with perfect ease, he
would find some embarrassment in getting out, --an idea most probably
borrowed by the architect, Yost Van Houten, from the mystery of an eelpot.
The schoolhouse stood in a rather lonely but pleasant situation, just at the
foot of a woody hill, with a brook running close by, and a formidable
birch-tree growing at one end of it. From hence the low murmur of his
pupils' voices, conning over their lessons, might be heard in a drowsy
summer's day, like the hum of a beehive; interrupted now and then by the
authoritative voice of the master, in the tone of menace or command, or,
peradventure, by the appalling sound of the birch, as he urged some tardy
loiterer along the flowery path of knowledge. Truth to say, he was a
conscientious man, and ever bore in mind the golden maxim, "Spare the
rod and spoil the child." Ichabod Crane's scholars certainly were not
spoiled.
I would not have it imagined, however, that he was one of those cruel
potentates of the school who joy in the smart of their subjects; on the
contrary, he administered justice with discrimination rather than severity;
taking the burden off the backs of the weak, and laying it on those of the
strong. Your mere puny stripling, that winced at the least flourish of the
rod, was passed by with indulgence; but the claims of justice were
satisfied by inflicting a double portion on some little tough wrong headed,
broad-skirted Dutch urchin, who sulked and swelled and grew dogged and
sullen beneath the birch. All this he called "doing his duty by their
parents;" and he never inflicted a chastisement without following it by the
assurance, so consolatory to the smarting urchin, that "he would remember
it and thank him for it the longest day he had to live."
When school hours were over, he was even the companion and
playmate of the larger boys; and on holiday afternoons would convoy
some of the smaller ones home, who happened to have pretty sisters, or
good housewives for mothers, noted for the comforts of the cupboard.
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Indeed, it behooved him to keep on good terms with his pupils. The
revenue arising from his school was small, and would have been scarcely
sufficient to furnish him with daily bread, for he was a huge feeder, and,
though lank, had the dilating powers of an anaconda; but to help out his
maintenance, he was, according to country custom in those parts, boarded
and lodged at the houses of the farmers whose children he instructed. With
these he lived successively a week at a time, thus going the rounds of the
neighborhood, with all his worldly effects tied up in a cotton handkerchief.
That all this might not be too onerous on the purses of his rustic
patrons, who are apt to considered the costs of schooling a grievous
burden, and schoolmasters as mere drones he had various ways of
rendering himself both useful and agreeable. He assisted the farmers
occasionally in the lighter labors of their farms, helped to make hay,
mended the fences, took the horses to water, drove the cows from pasture,
and cut wood for the winter fire. He laid aside, too, all the dominant
dignity and absolute sway with which he lorded it in his little empire, the
school, and became wonderfully gentle and ingratiating. He found favor in
the eyes of the mothers by petting the children, particularly the youngest;
and like the lion bold, which whilom so magnanimously the lamb did hold,
he would sit with a child on one knee, and rock a cradle with his foot for
whole hours together.
In addition to his other vocations, he was the singing- master of the
neighborhood, and picked up many bright shillings by instructing the
young folks in psalmody. It was a matter of no little vanity to him on
Sundays, to take his station in front of the church gallery, with a band of
chosen singers; where, in his own mind, he completely carried away the
palm from the parson. Certain it is, his voice resounded far above all the
rest of the congregation; and there are peculiar quavers still to be heard in
that church, and which may even be heard half a mile off, quite to the
opposite side of the mill-pond, on a still Sunday morning, which are said
to be legitimately descended from the nose of Ichabod Crane. Thus, by
divers little makeshifts, in that ingenious way which is commonly
denominated "by hook and by crook," the worthy pedagogue got on
tolerably enough, and was thought, by all who understood nothing of the
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labor of headwork, to have a wonderfully easy life of it.
The schoolmaster is generally a man of some importance in the
female circle of a rural neighborhood; being considered a kind of idle,
gentlemanlike personage, of vastly superior taste and accomplishments to
the rough country swains, and, indeed, inferior in learning only to the
parson. His appearance, therefore, is apt to occasion some little stir at the
tea-table of a farmhouse, and the addition of a supernumerary dish of
cakes or sweetmeats, or, peradventure, the parade of a silver teapot. Our
man of letters, therefore, was peculiarly happy in the smiles of all the
country damsels. How he would figure among them in the churchyard,
between services on Sundays; gathering grapes for them from the wild
vines that overran the surrounding trees; reciting for their amusement all
the epitaphs on the tombstones; or sauntering, with a whole bevy of them,
along the banks of the adjacent mill-pond; while the more bashful country
bumpkins hung sheepishly back, envying his superior elegance and
address.
From his half-itinerant life, also, he was a kind of traveling gazette,
carrying the whole budget of local gossip from house to house, so that his
appearance was always greeted with satisfaction. He was, moreover,
esteemed by the women as a man of great erudition, for he had read
several books quite through, and was a perfect master of Cotton Mather's
"History of New England Witchcraft," in which, by the way, he most
firmly and potently believed.
He was, in fact, an odd mixture of small shrewdness and simple
credulity. His appetite for the marvelous, and his powers of digesting it,
were equally extraordinary; and both had been increased by his residence
in this spell-bound region. No tale was too gross or monstrous for his
capacious swallow. It was often his delight, after his school was dismissed
in the afternoon, to stretch himself on the rich bed of clover bordering the
little brook that whimpered by his school-house, and there con over old
Mather's direful tales, until the gathering dusk of evening made the printed
page a mere mist before his eyes. Then, as he wended his way by swamp
and stream and awful woodland, to the farmhouse where he happened to
be quartered, every sound of nature, at that witching hour, fluttered his
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excited imagination, --the moan of the whip-poor-will from the hillside,
the boding cry of the tree toad, that harbinger of storm, the dreary hooting
of the screech owl, to the sudden rustling in the thicket of birds frightened
from their roost. The fireflies, too, which sparkled most vividly in the
darkest places, now and then startled him, as one of uncommon brightness
would stream across his path; and if, by chance, a huge blockhead of a
beetle came winging his blundering flight against him, the poor varlet was
ready to give up the ghost, with the idea that he was struck with a witch's
token. His only resource on such occasions, either to drown thought or
drive away evil spirits, was to sing psalm tunes and the good people of
Sleepy Hollow, as they sat by their doors of an evening, were often filled
with awe at hearing his nasal melody, "in linked sweetness long drawn
out," floating from the distant hill, or along the dusky road.
Another of his sources of fearful pleasure was to pass long winter
evenings with the old Dutch wives, as they sat spinning by the fire, with a
row of apples roasting and spluttering along the hearth, and listen to their
marvellous tales of ghosts and goblins, and haunted fields, and haunted
brooks, and haunted bridges, and haunted houses, and particularly of the
headless horseman, or Galloping Hessian of the Hollow, as they
sometimes called him. He would delight them equally by his anecdotes of
witchcraft, and of the direful omens and portentous sights and sounds in
the air, which prevailed in the earlier times of Connecticut; and would
frighten them woefully with speculations upon comets and shooting stars;
and with the alarming fact that the world did absolutely turn round, and
that they were half the time topsy-turvy!
But if there was a pleasure in all this, while snugly cuddling in the
chimney corner of a chamber that was all of a ruddy glow from the
crackling wood fire, and where, of course, no spectre dared to show its
face, it was dearly purchased by the terrors of his subsequent walk
homewards. What fearful shapes and shadows beset his path, amidst the
dim and ghastly glare of a snowy night! With what wistful look did he eye
every trembling ray of light streaming across the waste fields from some
distant window! How often was he appalled by some shrub covered with
snow, which, like a sheeted spectre, beset his very path! How often did he
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shrink with curdling awe at the sound of his own steps on the frosty crust
beneath his feet; and dread to look over his shoulder, lest he should behold
some uncouth being tramping close behind him! and how often was he
thrown into complete dismay by some rushing blast, howling among the
trees, in the idea that it was the Galloping Hessian on one of his nightly
scourings!
All these, however, were mere terrors of the night, phantoms of the
mind that walk in darkness; and though he had seen many spectres in his
time, and been more than once beset by Satan in divers shapes, in his
lonely perambulations, yet daylight put an end to all these evils; and he
would have passed a pleasant life of it, in despite of the Devil and all his
works, if his path had not been crossed by a being that causes more
perplexity to mortal man than ghosts, goblins, and the whole race of
witches put together, and that was--a woman.
Among the musical disciples who assembled, one evening in each
week, to receive his instructions in psalmody, was Katrina Van Tassel, the
daughter and only child of a substantial Dutch farmer. She was a booming
lass of fresh eighteen; plump as a partridge; ripe and melting and rosy-
cheeked as one of her father's peaches, and universally famed, not merely
for her beauty, but her vast expectations. She was withal a little of a
coquette, as might be perceived even in her dress, which was a mixture of
ancient and modern fashions, as most suited to set of her charms. She
wore the ornaments of pure yellow gold, which her great-great-
grandmother had brought over from Saar dam; the tempting stomacher of
the olden time, and withal a provokingly short petticoat, to display the
prettiest foot and ankle in the country round.
Ichahod Crane had a soft and foolish heart towards the sex; and it is
not to be wondered at, that so tempting a morsel soon found favor in his
eyes, more especially after he had visited her in her paternal mansion. Old
Baltus Van Tassel was a perfect picture of a thriving, contented, liberal-
hearted farmer. He seldom, it is true, sent either his eyes or his thoughts
beyond the boundaries of his own farm; but within those everything was
snug, happy and well-conditioned. He was satisfied with his wealth, but
not proud of it; and piqued himself upon the hearty abundance, rather than
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the style in which he lived. His stronghold was situated on the banks of the
Hudson, in one of those green, sheltered, fertile nooks in which the Dutch
farmers are so fond of nestling. A great elm tree spread its broad branches
over it, at the foot of which bubbled up a spring of the softest and sweetest
water, in a little well formed of a barrel; and then stole sparkling away
through the grass, to a neighboring brook, that babbled along among
alders and dwarf willows. Hard by the farmhouse was a vast barn, that
might have served for a church; every window and crevice of which
seemed bursting forth with the treasures of the farm; the flail was busily
resounding within it from morning