s, 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 marvelous, 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[1] from the hill-side; 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 fire-flies, 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 sputtering along the hearth, and
listen to their marvelous 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 woul