erely playing a practical
joke on the princess by impersonating the dead bridegroom, and
all ends happily. The story of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy
Hollow is set against so picturesque a background that we are
almost inclined to quarrel with those who laughed and said that
Ichabod Crane was still alive, and that Bram Jones, the lovely
Katrina's bridegroom, knew more of the spectre than he chose to
tell. The drowsy atmosphere of Sleepy Hollow makes us see visions
and dream dreams. The group of "Strange Stories by a Nervous
Gentleman" in _Tales of a Traveller_ (1824) prove that Washington
Irving was well versed in ghostly lore. He, as well as any, can
call spirits from the vasty deep, but, when they appear in answer
to his summons, he can seldom refrain from receiving them in a
jocose, irreverent mood, ill befitting the solemn, dignified
spectre of a German legend. Even the highly qualified,
irrepressibly loquacious ghost of Lewis Carroll's
_Phantasmagoria_ would have resented his genial familiarity. The
strange stories are told at a hunting-party in a country-house, a
cheerful, comfortable background for ghost stories. A hoary,
one-eyed gentleman, "the whole side of whose head was dilapidated
and seemed like the wing of a house shut up and haunted," sets
the ball rolling with the old story of a spectre who glides into
the room, wringing her hands, and is later identified, like
Scott's Lady in the Sacque, by her resemblance to an ancestral
portrait in the gallery. The "knowing" gentleman tells of a
picture that winked in a startling and alarming fashion, and
immediately explains away this phenomenon by the presence of a
thief who has cut a spy-hole in the canvas. _The Bold Dragoon_ is
a spirited, riotous nightmare in which the furniture dances to
the music of the bellows played by an uncanny musician in a long
flannel gown and a nightcap. The _Story of the German Student_ is
in a different key. Here Irving strikes a note of real horror.
The student falls in love with an imaginary lady, woven out of
his dreams. He finds her in distress one night in the streets of
Paris, takes her home, only to find her a corpse in the morning.
A police-officer informs him that the lady was guillotined the
day before, and the student discovers the truth of this statement
when he unrolls a bandage and her head falls to the floor. The
young man loses his reason, and is tormented by the belief that
an evil spirit has reanimated a dead bo