the war."[47]

Put into simple sentences, it would be like this: The dance was at an
end. Ichabod was attracted to a knot of folks. The folks were older.
They sat at the end of the piazza. Old Van Tassel was with them. They
were smoking, etc.

In such sentences, nothing is emphatic; it is all alike. In Irving's
sentences, where ideas are reduced to clause, phrase, even a word,
there is no question about what is important and what is unimportant.
He has secured an exquisite emphasis by a discriminating subdual of
subordinate ideas.

This brings up the sentences by Kipling already quoted on page 201.
The author has used three independent sentences. They can be written
as one, thus: The reason of her wandering was simple enough; for
Coppy, in a tone of too-hastily-assumed authority, had told her over
night that she must not ride out by the river, and she had gone to
prove her own spirit and teach Coppy a lesson.

There is a reason, however, why Kipling wished that last sentence to
stand alone. Subordinated as it is here rewritten, it does not half
express the spiteful independence she assumed to teach Coppy a lesson.
It needs the independent construction. Just as surely as Kipling is
right in putting the reasons into two sharp, independent sentences, is
Irving right when he puts the reason in the following sentence into a
subordinate clause. It is not important enough to deserve a sentence
all by itself.

"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."

In the following sentence the effect of subordination is
unmistakable:--

"He had a name in the village for brutally misusing the ass;
yet it is certain that he shed a tear _which_ made a clean
mark down one cheek."

Now read it again:--

"He had a name in the village for brutally misusing the ass;
yet it is certain that he shed a tear, _and the tear_ made a
clean mark down one cheek."

The last clause has burst away from its former submission, and in its
independence has made the most important announcement of the
sentence,--the witty climax. Emphasis is, to a large degree, a matter
of position, but position cannot emancipate any clause from the
thralldom of subordination. To emphasize one idea, sub