The schoolmaster of Sleepy Hollow was a man named Ichabod Crane. His name was a good one because he looked like the kind of bird which is called a crane. He was very tall and thin, with narrow shoulders and long arms and legs. His head was small, and very flat on the top. He had huge ears, large green eyes and a very long nose. He was not handsome at all.
Ichabod’s clothes did not fit him well. They were loose, and they flapped in the wind. So when he walked, the schoolmaster looked very strange.
The school was a low building with one large room, and Ichabod was the only teacher there. This schoolhouse stood by itself at the bottom of the valley. The hills around it were covered with trees. A small river ran near the schoolhouse.
On summer days, the windows of the schoolhouse were always open. Anyone who passed could hear Ichabod’s pupils saying their lessons in sleepy voices.
When lessons had finished for the day, Ichabod often went home with one of the children. Some boys and girls had pretty older sisters. Ichabod liked young, pretty ladies. And some of his pupils had mothers who where good cooks. Ichabod liked to go home with these children most of all.
Ichabod was very thin, but he ate huge amount of food. He loved talking about food and he loved thinking about food. Most of all, he loved eating it.
Ichabod loved food, but he loved singing too. He taught a group of young people to sing psalms – religious songs. Once a week, the group met for psalm-singing lessons. And every Sunday, Ichabod stood with his pupils in the church in the valley and sang psalms with them.
Ichabod had a good life. He did not earn very much money from teaching. He could not buy a house of his own. So he stayed at the houses of different farmers in the area. He stayed with each farmer for a week. Each week, a farmer gave the schoolmaster a bed to sleep in and food to eat. And Ichabod helped the farmers with the work on their farms. He mended fences. He took water to the horses. He cut wood for the farmers’ fires. Sometimes he helped the farmers’ wives to look after their children.
The farmers’ wives were always happy to see Ichabod. They often invited him to eat. They made delicious cakes for him. The young women of the area liked Ichabod too. Sometimes he took walks with them, or read them funny stories. They smiled at him whenever they met him.
All the people of Sleepy Hollow respected Ichabod Crane because he was a schoolmaster. He was clever – he worked with his mind, not with his hands. “He’s a very intelligent man,” everyone said. Most of the people in the valley could not read or write. But Ichabod could read. So he was an important man in the area.
Ichabod Crane believed in God, but he also believed very strongly in ghosts and spirits. On summer evenings, after lessons had finished, he often lay on the grass beside the small river. He lay on the warm grass and read his favourite book. It was a book about ghosts.
Ichabod loved the stories in this book, but they frightened him. He believed everything that he read in them! He often read the book until the sky was dark. Then he
could no longer see the pages, so he stopped reading. But then he had to walk back in the dark, to the farmhouse were he was staying.
A forest covered a large part of the area. Often, Ichabod had to walk through the forest to get to the farmhouse. These walks in the dark were terrible for him. He saw ghosts and spirits all around him. The branches of the trees looked like ghostly hands. And they were all trying to grab him.
And there were strange noises in the forest at night. They were really the noises of animals and birds in the trees. But to Ichabod, they were the sounds of evil spirits. Sometimes, his heart beat fast with fear and his legs would not move.
“This is terrible!” he thought, whenever this happened. “There are evil spirits here. They’re hiding in the trees and they want to take me away with them. What can I do? I’ll sing a psalm. Then the spirits won’t be able to hurt me.”
So Ichabod often sang a psalm as he walked through the dark forest:
I’m no afraid of ghosts
or evil spirits of the night.
God will always lead me
from the darkness to the light.
The people of Sleepy Hollow often sat outside the doors of their houses in the evenings. They heard the sound of Ichabod’s strange, high voice as he passed their homes.
“What’s that strange noise?” they asked each other. “Is it a spirit? Oh, no, it’s only Ichabod Crane. He’s singing as he walks home through the forest!”
On winter evenings, Ichabod sometimes sat with the old women of Sleepy Hollow. He sat by their kitchen fires with them, eating apples and listening to their wonderful ghost stories.
Ichabod’s favourite ghost stories were about the Headless Horseman. But when he had to walk home through the forest in the dark winter night, he tried to forget, about the stories. He was even more frightened than in the summer.
“Does the terrible Horseman only travel on the roads?” he asked himself. “Or does he haunt the forest too?”
On those dark nights, Ichabod saw the Horseman in every shadow. He heard the noise of the huge black horse in every sound!