des 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 weathercock 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 copy-books. 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
case, he would find some embarrassment in getting out--an idea most
probably borrowed by the architect, Yost Van Houten, from the mystery
of an ellpot. 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 of 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, that ever bore