not a stroke of work done in the village that day. The shoemaker abandoned his awl, the hatter his bowstring, the tailor his goose, and the forge of the blacksmith was cool from dawn till nightfall. Silent was the sonorous harmony of the big spinning wheel, silent the village song, and silent the fiddle of Master Timothy Canty, who passed his livelong time in playing tuneful measures and catching bugs and butterflies. It may not be out of place to let the careful Duyck- inck supply the grain of salt with which he warns us that Paulding should be enjoyed: In almost all the writings of Paulding there is occasionally infused a dash of his peculiar vein of humorous satire and keen sarcastic irony. . . . It is sometimes somewhat difficult to decide when he is jesting and when he is in earnest. This is on Digitized by Microsoft® In the Land of Irving 243 the whole a great disadvantage in an age when irony is seldom resorted to. With this timely caution posted in the path of litera- ture, we must be dull indeed if we do not suspect that perhaps the voice of the Rev. Mathias did not reach altogether across the river, — let us say half-way over — or that the wrestling for gin-slings was overesti- mated. But must we give up Tim Canty bodily? That would be almost as hard as to admit that Ichabod Crane had no actual prototype. Around his garret were disposed a number of unframed pic- tures, painted on glass, as in the olden time, representing the four seasons, the old King of Prussia, and Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, . . . the beautiful Constantia Phillips, and divers others. . . . The whole village poured into the garret to gaze at these chefs d'osuvre, and it is my confirmed opinion . . . that neither the gallery of Florence, Dresden, nor the Louvre was ever visited by so many real amateurs. There can be little doubt that, under the guidance of this lively companion, Washington Irving became familiar with what in the literary jargon of to-day is called local colour, used afterwards so lavishly upon the canvas whereon Ichabod and Katrina and Brom the Devil are painted with a master hand. We may suppose that the seed which was to come to fruition in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was planted in those youthful days and germinated during the twenty years' interval. The vivid impressions made by new and picturesque surroundings upon the im- pressionable mind of the lad of fifteen years of age Digitized by Microsoft® 244 The Hudson River were destined to affect the life and the fame of an American author in whose work, perhaps, as much as in that of any other, there is evidence of permanency. By his own confession, Irving was but an indifferent sportsman. His nephew tells us that he explored the recesses of Sleepy Hollow with a gun in 1798, but we know that the best spoils of those expeditions were not to be found in his game-bag. Clarence Cook, writing, in 1887, of his school days at Tarrytown, more than half a century ago, gives a pleasing picture not only of the place that still retained enough of simplicity to stamp its image upon his memory " as a sleepy neighbourhood, where dreaming was. more the fashion than doing," but of its historic and legendary associations. Considering how dead the village was, so far as active inter- ests were concerned, we were fortunate as schoolboys in having anything to quicken our minds in the history and associations of the region. We became strongly interested in the legendary gossip of the time of the Revolution, much of which centred about Andr^ ; his capture on our side of the river, and his trial and execution at Tappan, directly opposite us, on the other side of the broad Tappan Zee. The tree under which Andre's captors were sitting, playing cards, when he came up — for so the story ran — still stood in the field by the roadside ; although, between the relic-hunters and the lightning, it had come, when I knew it, to present a rather forlorn appearance. Mr. Irving made good dra- matic use of this tree in his Legend of Sleepy Hollow, but it is likely enough he had not seen it when he wrote the story. . . . While I was at school at Tarrytown, Mr. Irving was living on his little Sabine farm of Wolfert's Roost, which afterward was so widely known as Sunnyside. The place, which originally con- tained ten acres, afterward increased first to fifteen and finally Digitized by Microsoft® In the Land of Irving 245 to eighteen acres, lay on the river-bank