ham and smoked beef; and, moreover, delectable dishes of preserved plums and peaches and pears and quinces, not to mention broiled shad and roasted chickens, together with bowls of milk and cream, all mingled higgledy-piggledy, pretty much as I have enumerated them, with the motherly teapot sending up 710 its clouds of vapor from the midst - Heaven bless the mark! I want breath and time to discuss this banquet as it deserves, and am too eager to get on with my story. Happily, Ichabod Crane was not in so great a hurry as his historian, but did ample justice to every dainty. 715 He was a kind and thankful creature, whose heart dilated in proportion as his skin was filled with good cheer, and whose spirits rose with eating as some men's do with drink. He could not help, too, rolling his large eyes round him as he ate, and chuckling with the possibility that he might one day be lord 720 of all this scene of almost unimaginable luxury and splendor. Then he thought how soon he'd turn his back upon the old school-house, snap his fingers in the face of Hans Van Ripper and every other niggardly patron, and kick any itinerant pedagogue out of doors that should dare to call him comrade. 725 Old Baltus Van Tassel moved about among his guests with a face dilated with content and good-humor, round and jolly as the harvest moon. His hospitable attentions were brief, but expressive, being confined to a shake of the hand, a slap on the shoulder, a loud laugh, and a pressing invitation to "fall to, 730 and help themselves." And now the sound of the music from the common room or hall summoned to the dance. The musician was an old gray-headed negro, who had been the itinerant orchestra of the neighborhood for more than half a century. His instrument 735 709. Higgledy-piggledy, in confusion. 724. Niggardly ("The habit of attention to minute gains in earning money is closely connected with a careful unwillingness to spend, and the primary meaning of niggard is one who scrapes up money by little and little." Wedgwood), stingy. Itinerant (Lat. iter, itineris, journey), travelling, in the habit of journeying from place to place. was as old and battered as himself. The greater part of the time he scraped on two or three strings, accompanying every movement of the bow with a motion of the head, bowing almost to the ground and stamping with his foot whenever a fresh couple were to start. 740 Ichabod prided himself upon his dancing as much as upon his vocal powers. Not a limb, not a fibre about him was idle; and to have seen his loosely hung frame in full motion, and clattering about the room, you would have thought St. Vitus himself, that blessed patron of the dance, was figuring before you in person. 745 He was the admiration of all the negroes, who, having gathered, of all ages and sizes, from the farm and the neighborhood, stood forming a pyramid of shining black faces at every door and window, gazing with delight at the scene, rolling their white eyeballs, and showing grinning rows of ivory from ear to ear. 750 How could the flogger of urchins be otherwise than animated and joyous? The lady of his heart was his partner in the dance, and smiling graciously in reply to all his amorous oglings; while Brom Bones, sorely smitten with love and jealousy, sat brooding by himself in one corner. When the dance was at an end, Ichabod was attracted to a knot of the sager folks, who, with old Van Tassel, sat smoking at one end of the piazza, gossiping over former times, and drawing out long stories about the war. 755 This neighborhood, at the time of which I am speaking, was 760 one of those highly favored places which abound with chronicle and great men. The British and American line had run near 744. St. Vitus. He is said to have been the son of a noble Sicilian, and to have been secretly brought up in the Christian faith by his nurse. It is related that his father beat and imprisoned him, to force him to renounce his religion, but that, while in the dungeon, his father looked through the keyhole and saw him dancing with seven beautiful angels. He is sometimes assumed to be the patron saint of dancers and actors, and is invoked against the nervous disease, St. Vitus' dance. 751. Flogger of urchins. Ichabod has various names and epithets," the flogger of urchins," "a worthy wight," "a huge feeder," "worthy pedagogue," ," "the enraptured Ichabod,” “a kind and thankful creature," etc. Is there any special appropriateness in each ? it during the war; it had, therefore, been the scene of marauding, and infested with refugees, cow-boys, and all kinds of border chivalry. Just sufficient time had elapsed to enable each story- 765 teller to dress up his tale with a little becoming fiction, and, in the indistinctness of his recollection, to make himself the hero of every exploit. There was the story of Doffue Martling, a large blue-bearded Dutchman, who had nearly taken a British frigate with an old 770 iron nine-pounder from a mud breastwork, only that his gun burst at the sixth discharge. And there was an old gentleman who shall be nameless, being too rich a mynheer to be lightly mentioned, who, in the battle of White Plains, being an excellent master of defence, parried a musket-ball with a small-sword, 75 insomuch that he absolutely felt it whiz round the blade, and glance off at the hilt in proof of which he was ready at any time to show the sword, with the hilt a little bent. There were several more that had been equally great in the field, not one of whom but was persuaded that he had a considerable hand in 700 bringing the war to a happy termination. But all these were nothing to the tales of ghosts and apparitions that succeeded. The neighborhood is rich in legendary treasures of the kind. Local tales and superstitions thrive best in these sheltered long-settled retreats; but are trampled under 785 foot by the shifting throng that forms the population of most of our country places. Besides, there is no encouragement for ghosts in most of our villages, for they have scarcely had time. to finish their first nap, and turn themselves in their graves, before their surviving friends have travelled away from the 790 neighborhood; so that when they turn out at night to walk 764. Cow-boys, a band of plunderers in the time of the American Revolution. They infested the "neutral ground" lying between the American and British lines, and robbed all those who had taken the oath of allegiance to the Continental Congress. 773. Mynheer (Ger. mein, my; herr, sir, lord). A Dutch word meaning Sir, Mr., or my lord; in English use, a Dutchman. 774. White Plains. An indecisive engagement between the Americans and British took place here, October 28, 1776. their rounds, they have no acquaintance left to call upon. This is perhaps the reason why we so seldom hear of ghosts, except in our long-established Dutch communities. The immediate cause, however, of the prevalence of super- 795 natural stories in these parts, was doubtless owing to the vicinity of Sleepy Hollow. There was a contagion in the very air that blew from that haunted region; it breathed forth an atmosphere of dreams and fancies infecting all the land. Several of the Sleepy Hollow people were present at Van Tassel's, and, o as usual, were doling out their wild and wonderful legends. Many dismal tales were told about funeral trains, and mourning cries and wailings heard and seen about the great tree where the unfortunate Major André was taken, and which stood in the neighborhood. Some mention was made also of the woman 805 in white that haunted the dark glen at Raven Rock, and was often heard to shriek on winter nights before a storm, having perished there in the snow. The chief part of the stories, however, turned upon the favorite spectre of Sleepy Hollow, the headless horseman, who had been heard several times of late, 810 patrolling the country; and, it was said, tethered his horse nightly among the graves in the churchyard. The sequestered situation of this church seems always to have made it a favorite haunt of troubled spirits. It stands on a knoll surrounded by locust-trees and lofty elms, from among 815 which its decent whitewashed walls shine modestly forth, like Christian purity beaming through the shades of retirement. A gentle slope descends from it to a silver sheet of water, bordered by high trees, between which peeps may be caught at the blue hills of the Hudson. To look upon its grass-grown yard, where s 804. Major André. John André, the British agent in the affairs of Arnold's treason, was captured September 23, 1780, by three militia-men, who refused the large bribes he offered for his release, and delivered him up to the military authorities. He was hanged as a spy, and his body was buried under the gallows at Tappan, near the Hudson River; but in 1821 his remains were delivered to the English, on petition of the Duke of York, and were placed in a grave near a monument erected to his memory in Westminster Abbey. 813. Sequestered (Lat. sequestrare, to seclude), secluded. the sunbeams seem to sleep so quietly, one would think that there at least the dead might rest in peace. On one side of the church extends a wide woody dell, along which raves a large brook broken rocks and trunks of fallen trees. Over a among deep black part of the stream, not far from the church, was 825 formerly thrown a wooden bridge; the road that led to it, and the bridge itself, were thickly shaded by overhanging trees, which cast a gloom about it, even in the daytime, but occasioned a fearful darkness at night. Such was one of the favorite haunts of the headless horseman, and the place where he was most fre- 830 quently encountered. The tale was told of old Brouwer, a most heretical disbeliever in ghosts, how he met the horseman returning from his foray into Sleepy Hollow, and was obliged to get up behind him; how they galloped over bush and brake, over hill and swamp, until they reached the bridge; when the 835 horseman suddenly turned into a skeleton, threw old Brouwer into the brook, and sprang away over the tree-tops with a clap of thunder. This story was immediately matched by a thrice marvellous. adventure of Brom Bones, who made light of the Galloping G Hessian as an arrant jockey. He affirmed that, on returning one night from the neighboring village of Sing-Sing, he had been overtaken by this midnight trooper; that he had offered to race with him for a bowl of punch, and should have won it too, for Daredevil beat the goblin horse all hollow, but, just as 845 they came to the church bridge, the Hessian bolted, and vanished in a flash of fire. All these tales, told in that drowsy undertone with which men talk in the dark, the countenances of the listeners only now and then receiving a casual gleam from the glare of a pipe, 80 sank deep in the mind of Ichabod. He repaid them in kind with large extracts from his invaluable author, Cotton Mather, 833. Foray (Lat. foris, externally, beyond boundaries? or French fourrager, to fodder, forage, ravage; Anglo-Sax. foder, food ?), a hostile military incursion, especially in border warfare. 845. Beat the goblin horse all hollow. All hollow, meaning completely, is colloquial and inelegant. |