http://www.arcamax.com/fiction/b-1013-1
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW
by Washington Irving
FOUND AMONG THE PAPERS OF THE LATE DIEDRICH 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 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 marvellous
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
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.
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.
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 consider 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 millpond, 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 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 millpond; 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 travelling
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 marvellous, 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
schoolhouse, 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 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, or 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 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!