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.”