The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

"A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land," Irving writes of a little valley off the Hudson, and for a few pages he lets you doze in it, the brook murmuring and old Dutch wives trading ghost stories by the fire. Into this hush walks Ichabod Crane, the schoolmaster, all elbows and appetite, who looks at the Van Tassel farm and sees every pig already roasted and running about with a pudding in its belly. He wants the farmer's daughter, Katrina, and he wants her father's acres more. He also believes every word of Cotton Mather on witchcraft. That combination is the whole comedy, and the whole terror. Irving laughs at his hero the entire way, and still, when Ichabod rides home alone through the dark toward the church bridge where a headless Hessian trooper is said to gallop, the laughter thins. You hear the hoofbeats behind him before he dares turn round. This is the story America still tells itself every October, and it is funnier and far stranger than the costume version.