And now, supper being ended, the sound of music from the common room summoned to the dance. The musician was an old, gray-headed negro, who had been the itinerant orchestra of the neighborhood for more than half a century. His instrument was as old and battered as himself. The greater part of the time he scraped away on two or three strings, moving his head with every movement of the bow, and stamping his foot whenever a fresh couple were to start.
Ichabod prided himself on his dancing. Not a limb, not a fiber about him was idle. How could the flogger of urchins be otherwise than animated and joyous? When the dance was over, Ichabod joined a circle of the older folks, who, with Herr Van Tassel, sat smoking at one end of the piazza, and told stories of the war and wild and wonderful legends of ghosts and other supernatural beings.
Some mention was made of a woman in white that haunted the dark glen at Raven Rock, and was often heard to shriek on wintry nights before a storm. The chief part of the stories, however, turned upon the favorite specter of Sleepy Hollow, the headless horseman, who had been heard several times of late patrolling the country. One man told how he had once met the horseman and was obliged to get up behind him; how they galloped over bush and brake, over hill and swamp, until they reached the bridge by the church, when the horseman suddenly turned into a skeleton, threw him into the brook, and sprang away over the tree tops with a clap of thunder.
A wild, roistering young man, who was called Brom Bones, declared that the headless horseman was, after all, no rider compared with himself. He said that returning one night from the neighboring village of Sing Sing, he had been overtaken by this midnight trooper; that he had offered to race with him for a bowl of punch, and would have won it, too, but just as they came to the church bridge, the specter bolted and vanished in a flash of fire.
IV. The Midnight Adventure
| idea | gnarled | sensitive | sociability |
| dismal | covert | gigantic | desperation |
| inquiry | violence | opposite | evidently |
The party now gradually broke up. The old farmers gathered together their families in their wagons, and were heard for some time rattling along the hollow roads and over the distant hills. Their light-hearted laughter, mingling with the clatter of hoofs, echoed along the silent woodlands, growing fainter and fainter till they gradually died away, and the late scene of noise and frolic was all silent and deserted.
It was the very witching time of night that Ichabod pursued his travel homeward. In the dead hush of midnight he could hear the barking of a dog on the opposite shore of the Hudson, but it was so vague and faint as only to give an idea of the distance between them. No signs of life occurred near, but now and then the chirp of a cricket, or perhaps the guttural twang of a bullfrog from a neighboring marsh, as if sleeping uncomfortably and turning suddenly in his bed.
All the stories that Ichabod had heard about ghosts and goblins now came crowding into his mind. The night grew darker and darker. The stars seemed to sink deeper in the sky, and driving clouds occasionally hid them from his sight. He had never felt so lonely and dismal. He was, moreover, approaching the very place where many of the scenes of the ghost stories had been laid. In the center of the road stood an enormous tulip tree, which towered like a giant above all the other trees of the neighborhood and formed a kind of landmark. Its limbs were gnarled and fantastic, large as the trunks of ordinary trees, twisting down almost to the ground, and rising again into the air.