great fondness for the
theater. The stolen delight of the theater he first tasted in company
with a boy who was somewhat his senior, but destined to be his literary
comrade,--James K. Paulding, whose sister was the wife of Irving's
brother William. Whenever he could afford this indulgence, he stole
away early to the theater in John Street, remained until it was time to
return to the family prayers at nine, after which he would retire to
his room, slip through his window and down the roof to a back alley, and
return to enjoy the after-piece.

Young Irving's school education was desultory, pursued under several
more or less incompetent masters, and was over at the age of sixteen.
The teaching does not seem to have had much discipline or solidity;
he studied Latin a few months, but made no other incursion into the
classics. The handsome, tender-hearted, truthful, susceptible boy was no
doubt a dawdler in routine studies, but he assimilated what suited him.
He found his food in such pieces of English literature as were floating
about, in "Robinson Crusoe" and "Sindbad;" at ten he was inspired by
a translation of "Orlando Furioso;" he devoured books of voyages and
travel; he could turn a neat verse, and his scribbling propensities were
exercised in the composition of childish plays. The fact seems to be
that the boy was a dreamer and saunterer; he himself says that he
used to wander about the pier heads in fine weather, watch the ships
departing on long voyages, and dream of going to the ends of the earth.
His brothers Peter and John had been sent to Columbia College, and it is
probable that Washington would have had the same advantage if he had
not shown a disinclination to methodical study. At the age of sixteen he
entered a law office, but he was a heedless student, and never acquired
either a taste for the profession or much knowledge of law. While he sat
in the law office, he read literature, and made considerable progress
in his self-culture; but he liked rambling and society quite as well
as books. In 1798 we find him passing a summer holiday in Westchester
County, and exploring with his gun the Sleepy Hollow region which he
was afterwards to make an enchanted realm; and in 1800 he made his
first voyage up the Hudson, the beauties of which he was the first
to celebrate, on a visit to a married sister who lived in the Mohawk
Valley. In 1802 he became a law clerk in the office of Josiah Ogden
Hoffman, and began that en