The Legend of Sleepy Hollow | Page 4

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!
All these, however,