[In the following essay, Hoffman explains how “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” dramatizes a conflict between two cultures—those of the Yankee city-dweller and the backwoodsman—that was to become a major theme in American literature.]

One

The first important literary statement of the themes of native folk character and superstition was made, fittingly enough, in the first literary work by an American to win worldwide acclaim. When The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. appeared in London in 1819, its author became the first of a long series of expatriate Americans who found their native roots all the more poignant for viewing them from a distance.

Washngton Irving was fortunate, granted his special though restricted gifts, to be alive and in England at that moment in the history of literature. He sought out, and was taken up by, Sir Walter Scott, who was showing how the sentiment of nostalgia for the past could infuse fiction and become its informing principle. In his novels Scott projected that sense of historical continuity which formed a curious undercurrent of sensibility even before the Romantic movement began. Little though the Augustans attended the medieval or more recent past, there were important eighteenth-century successors to such early antiquarian works as Sir Thomas Browne's collection of Vulgar Errors (1648) and Samuel Pepys' collection of broadside ballads. Bishop Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and John Brand's Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain (1795) laid the groundwork for the two directions British folklore study has followed ever since. Scott took his prominent place in both with his ballad collection, The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802) and his comprehensive Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830). Much more influential, however, than these formal studies in introducing a whole generation of readers—and authors—to such materials was his use of folklore in his own fiction. One of Scott's earliest and most popular disciples along this line was a young American littérateur, the London representative of P. E. Irving & Co., New York dealers in hardware.

Washington Irving was already something of an antiquary. His early Knickerbocker's History of New York reveals him to be enchanted with the very past he satirized. In The Sketch Book Irving used several themes to which he would again and again recur: the Gothic tale in the German manner of ‘The Spectre Bridegroom,’ the antiquarian nostalgia of the four sketches on English Christmas customs, the character sketch of ‘The Village Angler.’ The two selections destined for most enduring fame, however, were careful reconstructions of the scenes of Irving's own boyhood in the Dutch communities of the Hudson Valley. One of these retells a German folktale in this American setting, in which Rip Van Winkle sleeps away his twenty years after a heady game of bowls with the ghostly crew of the Half-Moon. In the other tale, ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,’ Irving brought into belles-lettres for the first time the comic mythology and folk beliefs of his native region. In Ichabod Crane and Brom Bones he dramatized that clash of regional characters—the Yankee versus the Backwoodsman—which would soon become a major theme in our literature, as well as a continuing motif in a century and a half of folktales, and in our national history.

It is surprising that the extent to which Irving drew upon native folklore has scarcely been acknowledged. The chief reason for this seems to be Henry A. Pochmann's convincing demonstration, in 1930, of the extent of Irving's indebtedness to his German contemporaries. Stanley T. Williams, in his definitive biography, gives us a further exploration of Irving's methods of composition.¹ When we see the extent to which Irving depended on other men's books, often translating without acknowledgment, we can understand why recent critics are reluctant to grant him credit for originality in interpreting American themes.

The foremost students of American humor have strangely overlooked ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.’ Walter Blair does call it ‘a characteristic piece of American humor,’ but his remark is relegated to a footnote. And Constance Rourke, writing with her usual felicity, remarks that ‘in the Knickerbocker History and in Rip Van Winkle Irving created a comic mythology as though comic myth-making were a native habit, formed early …... But his Dutch people were of the past, joining only at a distance with current portrayals of native character.’² Why did Miss Rourke not mention ‘Sleepy Hollow’? I do not know; but I hope to show that in Ichabod and Brom Bones, Irving gave us portrayals of current native character projected backwards in time, rather than merely historical types unrooted in contemporary folklore.

There are of course good reasons why Brom and Ichabod have not been so recognized. For one thing, Irving's style is hardly what we expect in a folk document. For another, the Hudson Valley Dutch have long been thought an alien people by the Anglo-Saxons who conquered, surrounded, and outnumbered them. But the third and principal reason is Irving's own treatment of his Dutch materials. Almost everywhere except in ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ he deliberately altered the traditional characteristics of the Dutch for the purposes of his own fiction. As a consequence of Irving's popularity and of widespread ignorance of what the Dutch were really like, his caricatures were widely accepted as portraits of the Dutch-Americans. Paulding, writing The Dutchman's Fireside twenty-two years after the Knickerbocker History, imitated his friend in attributing chuckleheadedness and indolence to the brothers Vancour. In Cooper's Satanstoe (1845), however, we get a more realistic picture of the Dutch; his Guert Ten Eyck amply fulfills the historian Janvier's description: the Dutch ‘were tough and they were sturdy, and they were as plucky as men could be.’³ Only in ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ did Irving give a Dutchman these attributes; everywhere else he made them fat, foolish, pompous, and pleasure-loving. Here his usual Dutchman does appear (Van Tassel), but only in the background. Brom Bones is his realistic Dutch frontiersman, who meets and bests a Yankee in the traditional conflict of our native folk humor. Why did Irving choose this theme, so different from his usual preoccupations?

When we admit his dependence upon books, we must look at the kinds of authors on whom he depended. Othmar and Musaeus were collectors and redactors of folktales and märchen. Irving knew personally a third folklorist, Dr. Karl Böttiger, ‘who undoubtedly was able to give him expert advice on his folklore studies.’⁴ Wherever Irving went he collected popular sayings and beliefs; he was prepossessed by a sense of the past, and recognized the power—and the usefulness to a creative artist—of popular antiquities. Brom and Ichabod had their beginnings in local characters he had known as a boy;⁵ what made them take their singular form, however, was the direction in which Irving's imagination impelled them. And that direction was toward the fabulous. The fabulous was Irving's milieu.

In a reminiscence twenty years after The Sketch Book, Irving revealed that Diedrich Knickerbocker had learned the legend of Sleepy Hollow from an old Negro who gave him ‘that invaluable kind of information, never to be acquired from books,’ and from ‘the precious revelations of the good dame at the spinning wheel.’⁶ Of Musaeus' Volksmärchen he says nothing. But he may well indeed have heard such stories in the old Dutch chimney corners. H. W. Thompson recounts similar motifs in York State folklore: nightly visitations by a shrieking woman ‘tied to the tail of a giant horse with fiery eyes’; and ‘a curious phantom … uttering unearthly laughter, lights shining from her finger tips.’ There were revenants aplenty in Catskills. Still another important part of Dutch folk culture was the lusty practical joking⁷ which Cooper used in some of the most spirited pages in Satanstoe. Both aspects of Dutch folk life—the villagers' superstitions and their humor—are immortalized in ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.’

Two

Irving sets his story in a folk society: ‘It is in such little retired Dutch villages … that population, manners, and customs remain fixed; while the great torrent of migration and improvement, which is making such incessant changes in other parts of this restless country, sweeps by them unobserved.’ And again: ‘The neighborhood is rich in legendary lore … Local tales and superstitions thrive best in these sheltered long-settled retreats.’ Into this community comes Ichabod Crane, ‘a native of Connecticut, a State which supplied the Union with pioneers for the mind as well as for the forest.’ Ichabod is Irving's Connecticut Yankee, the fictional ancestor of Mark Twain's Hartford mechanic. But his nearer descendants are Sam Slick, Jack Downing, Hosea Biglow. Before any of these was born in print Ichabod had already been a country teacher, a singing master, a sometime farmer; later he is to undergo still further metamorphoses which link him still more closely to these heroes of popular legend and literature. Like Ben Franklin, like Hawthorne's Holgrave, like the schoolmaster in Snowbound and Melville's marvelous Confidence Man, he was a jack of all trades. Metamorphosis is always magical, but now, in an egalitarian society, the magic is the power of self-reliance, not of Satan.

Ichabod's native shrewdness and perseverance are somewhat compromised by his credulity. ‘No tale was too gross or monstrous for his capacious swallow.’ Ichabod devoutly believed in all the remarkable prodigies retailed in Cotton Mather's History of New England Witchcraft (that is, the Magnalia Christi Americani). There he found spectral ships manned by ghostly women, heretics giving birth to monsters, revenants pursuing the innocent with invisible instruments of torture. But of all the ghostly tales in the valley, the one Ichabod Crane most liked to hear was that of the Headless Horseman.

Meanwhile, we remember, Ichabod falls in love with Katrina Van Tassel; more exactly, seeing her father's prosperous farm, he envisages ‘every roasting pig running about with a pudding in his belly, and an apple in his mouth.’

Considerations of this sort lead Ichabod into a most interesting reverie: he imagines ‘the blooming Katrina, with a whole family of children, mounted on the top of a wagon loaded with household trumpery, with pots and kettles dangling beneath; and he beheld himself bestriding a pacing mare, with a colt at her heels, setting out for Kentucky, Tennessee, or Lord knows where.’ Here we have Ichabod Boone—Connecticut's pioneer of the wilderness as well as of the mind. Traditionally the American frontiersman has resented the mercantile civilizer; in a thousand folktales the shaggy woodsman frightens the Yankee clear out of the district.

Ichabod's fatuous dream of pioneering prepares the way for his rival's entrance: ‘a burly, roaring, roistering blade … Brom Van Brunt, the hero of the country round, which rang with his feats of strength and hardihood.’ He had ‘a mingled air of fun and arrogance,’ and was ‘always ready for either a fight or a frolic; but had more mischief than ill-will in his composition.’ Famous for horsemanship, ‘foremost at all races and cockfights’ was Brom; ‘and when any madcap prank, or rustic brawl, occurred in the vicinity, [the neighbors] always shook their heads, and warranted Brom Bones was at the bottom of it.’

Making allowances for Irving's smoothly flowing style, what we have here described is a Catskill Mike Fink, a Ring-Tailed Roarer from Kinderhook. While Irving was writing these lines in London, the real Mike Fink was somewhere west of Pittsburgh, shooting the heel off a nigger to make his foot fit the shoe, scalping Indians for the pure hell of it, roistering in towns along the Ohio. In Brom Bones's good-natured mischief there is a tinge of Mike Fink's brutality, if not of his sadism. That other favorite frontiersman, Davy Crockett, had not by 1819 become a national figure; yet the type—the swaggering frontier braggart, the prodigious hunter and strong man, the daredevil, the mischief-maker—was already well established in oral tradition. Irving's depiction of Brom Bones certainly gave these characteristics new clarity as they are combined for the first time in a fictional portrait of the genus frontiersman.

Irving now pits his rival suitors against each other. Ichabod, the Yankee, ‘had a happy mixture of pliability and perseverance in his nature.’ Although he is caricatured unmercifully, he is not entirely unworthy of our grudging admiration; a thoroughly self-reliant citizen, he adapts his strategy to meet the case. ‘To have taken the field openly against his rival would have been madness,’ so Ichabod insinuates himself into Katrina's notice while masquerading as her singing-master. Here he outwits Big Brom in the contest, perennially fresh in American comic lore, between wit and strength. But Ichabod forces Brom Bones to draw upon his own resources—the rough fancy of the frontiersman—as well as upon brute strength. This proves a dangerous combination for the scholar.

At Van Tassel's quilting frolic, when the old Negro tunes the fiddle and rosins the bow, Ichabod finds his métier, fair grounds whereon he can excel Brom Bones. The ungainly form of the pedagogue achieves animation if not grace, for he is from Down East in Connecticut and is sufficiently sophisticated to know how to dance with a lady. Brom, the bumpkin, ‘sorely smitten with love and jealousy, sat brooding by himself in one corner.’

The dancing over, talk now turns to the recently concluded Revolutionary War. Old soldiers' exploits become more heroic at each telling, as Irving skillfully moves us from the reality of the dance to mildly comic exaggerations of heroic truth, then to the supernatural itself. We are near Sleepy Hollow, and ‘there was a contagion in the very air that blew from that haunted region.’ The mythology of war blends with that of the otherworld, lending credence to the supernatural, as we learn that ‘mourning cries and wailings [were] heard and seen about the great tree where the unfortunate Major André was taken’; and we hear of ‘the woman in white, that haunted the dark glen at Raven Rock,’ who ‘was often heard to shriek on winter nights before a storm, having perished there in the snow.’ But the presiding spirit at this haunted conference was the Headless Horseman, who tethers his horse in the graveyard, haunts the church, and chases travellers. Brom Bones has met him. Riding his horse, Daredevil, Brom challenged the ghost to race for a bowl of punch—‘and should have won it too, for Daredevil beat the goblin horse all hollow, but, just as they came to the church-bridge, the Hessian bolted, and vanished in a flash of fire.’

Here is the bravado of the American hero, so confident of his own powers that he will risk everything for nothing, as Sam Patch did when he jumped Niagara just to prove that ‘Some things can be done as well as others.’ Such reckless daring makes the Faustus legend seem native in this land; Irving tried his hand at that in ‘The Devil and Tom Walker’ a generation before Hawthorne gave the devil's compact more sombre treatment, a century before Stephen Vincent Benét outdid him in this comic mode.

But Ichabod reasserts the dominance of evil over American self-reliance: he quotes Mather on witches, and describes the ghosts he has seen himself. The homely Puritan cannot accept the bravado of the backwoods Natural Man; Ichabod and Brom inhabit different worlds although they live in the same village. When Ichabod bids Katrina good night, he is chagrined to find that his hopes for a prosperous match have somehow gone awry. Perhaps, having observed her rival swains' reactions to supernatural perils, she has decided not to be a Puritan's bride, however nimbly he may dance the quadrille. Ichabod steals away heavy at heart.

Now, in the best-known part of the story, comes Irving's debt to Musaeus. But the stylistic control of the atmosphere shows Irving's own talent at its best, while the conclusion of the story is of signal importance in the literary development of an American myth. The darkness deepens; all the tales of ghosts and witches crowd into Ichabod's brain. Now he crosses the stream where André was captured, a haunted brook. Ichabod is appalled to find he no longer rides alone. A silent horseman splashes beside him. Coming out of the valley, Ichabod gets a look at his companion and discovers, in terror, that he carries his head in his hands! Crane rushes toward the church-bridge, where the Hessian, pursuing Brom, had disappeared. Reaching the bridge, Ichabod turns ‘to see if his pursuer should vanish, according to rule’—a fine pedantic touch!—but sees instead ‘the goblin rising in his stirrups … hurling his head at him. Ichabod endeavored to dodge the horrible missile, but too late.’ He falls from his horse, ‘and the black steed, and the goblin rider, passed by like a whirlwind.’

Ichabod was never seen again in Sleepy Hollow. His landlord burns his copy of Mather's Witchcraft and determines to keep his own children from school, ‘observing that he never knew of any good come of this same reading and writing.’

Three

Here in this York State valley, Irving's Dutch braggart concocts the perfect backwoodsman's revenge on the Yankee.⁸ This first statement of the theme is among the most memorable it has ever received in our literature; it is with us yet and ever has been, in Davy Crockett outwitting peddlers, in a thousand dime novels and popular magazines in which the yokel gets the best of the city slicker.⁹

The rustic hero may be naïve and honest, with only his common sense to help him make his way in the world; so he appears as Jack Downing, as Hosea Biglow, as Robin in Hawthorne's My Kinsman, Major Molineux, as Huckleberry Finn. Or he may be a swashbuckling braggart, half horse, half alligator, like all the ring-tailed roarers and Thorpe's Big Bear of Arkansas. No matter; in either form he represents the American élan, the pioneer, the Natural Man rebelling against the burden of guilt of the ages. It was he who cut the cords that bound him to the English throne, to all king-ridden Europe. Naked he stands in the wilderness, bereft of the past, confident that all human history begins—with him.

Who is his adversary? Perhaps an insufferable fop from the city to the East—traditions, culture, lineage, class distinctions always come from the East in American mythology: from New England, from Europe. Perhaps he is a shrewd, narrow-nosed Yankee peddler. No matter; in either form he stands for that ancient heritage of useless learning and inherited guilt against which the American, in each succeeding generation, must rebel.

Such are the roles in this ever-recurring fable of the American destiny. Washington Irving, whose birth coincided with that of the Republic, formulated a theme of its national literature with his dramatization of the Republic's dominant myth. Even Henry James is in his debt.

But what of Ichabod Crane? Did the pumpkin kill him? Of course not! Our folk heroes never die. Wearing the magic cloak of metamorphosis, they stave off death forever by simply changing their occupations. The ungainly pedagogue is no more—long live the New York City lawyer! For that is what Ichabod becomes after he makes his way from Sleepy Hollow. And onward and upward he goes: from the bar into politics, from his office to the press, thence to the bench. Far be it from Washington Irving to analyze or criticize the great American myth; where he finds a mythology of humor, he improves it on its own grounds. Responding instinctively to his fabulous materials, he makes Ichabod unforgettable in a stunning caricature. Brom, who is much more like life, is not so memorable, even though Americans always love a winner.

Yet Ichabod is not ultimately the loser in this legend. All he has lost is a farm girl's love and a measure of self-respect; the former was no real passion, the latter can be repaired. Ichabod Crane is a sorry symbol of learning, of culture, of sophistication, of a decayed religious faith, of an outworn order in the world. His very name suggests decrepitude: ‘And she named him Ichabod, saying, The glory is departed from Israel’ (I Sam. iv. 21). But Ichabod Crane is no Israelite; although an anachronism in all other respects, he is yet an American. And therefore he is immortal. Back to the city he goes, to find success.

Brom Bones stays in the village and gets the girl. He deserved her more than Ichabod did, for while the scholar danced and counted his stuffed pigs, Brom experienced two human emotions: jealousy and love.

Ichabod also knew two emotions, and two only. His were fear and ambition. He is not the loser, because he leads a full and prosperous life, experiencing to the brim the two emotions which give meaning to his existence: fear, in Sleepy Hollow, and ambition, in New York City. For it is the same ambition which led him to court Katrina Van Tassel that takes him later to the bar and the polls, to the editor's chair and the juror's bench. Ambition of this magnitude requires for its satisfaction a culture sufficiently complex to be capable of corruption. It cannot be gratified in the folk society of Sleepy Hollow Village, where the good people are as pure as the air.

Fear and ambition are Ichabod's, but not love. That is because Ichabod Crane is not wholly human. A sterile intellectual, his head aswim with worthless anachronisms, his heart set on material gain, Ichabod is gracelessly devoid of the natural human affections. He is the bumpkin's caricature of what life in the seat of a corrupt civilization can make of a man.

When one compares ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ to the bulk of Irving's work it seems anomalous that he could have mustered the imaginative power to enrich us so greatly, for most of Irving's writing betrays a lack of creative energy, a paucity of invention. Irving, after all, was never able successfully to transcend the limited aims of a ‘sketch,’ and he continued to rework his old themes in new disguises,¹⁰ telling a tale now set in old Dutch New York, now in Germany, now in England, now in Spain. Bracebridge Hall, Tales of a Traveller, most of Wolfert's Roost and The Sketch Book itself make tedious reading today. They show all too plainly Irving's faults: his dependence upon secondary sources, and the restricted range of emotional experience from which he was able to create fiction. But in the characters of Ichabod and Brom Bones, Irving found archetypal figures already half-created by the popular imagination. Among all of Irving's characters only Rip Van Winkle has as great a power to move us; and Rip, too, is what the highly developed but narrow gift of a storyteller whose milieu was the fabulous has made of a character from folklore. Although the original Peter Klaus was German, the themes of Rip Van Winkle are universal: the pathos of change, the barely-averted tragedy of loss of personal identity. And, as Louis LeFevre has pointed out,¹¹ Rip is indeed close to an aspect of the American national character—that yearning for escape from work and responsibility which is exemplified by a host of gadgets and the day-dream dramas of contemporary popular culture. Irving's Knickerbocker Dutchmen were, as Miss Rourke observed, remote caricatures resurrected from a distant past. But when Irving dramatized the homely comic figures he found in native American folk traditions, his Ichabod and Brom pass so readily into the reader's own imagination that they seem to be persons we have always known. ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ sketches the conflict of cultures which the rest of our literature has adumbrated ever since. One could predict that from Irving's story; both Ichabod Crane and Brom Bones lived lustily ever after. They are rivals yet.

Notes

1. Irving's use of folk traditions of piracy is noted by W. H. Bonner, Pirate Laureate: The Life & Legends of Captain Kidd (New Brunswick, N. J., 1947), pp. 151-65; Leonard Beach discusses Irving's use of American themes and recognizes Ichabod as ‘Irving's judgment of Puritanism’: ‘Washington Irving,’ University of Kansas City Review, XIV (1948), 259-66. Pochmann notes ‘Irving's German Sources in The Sketch Book,’ Studies in Philology, XXVII (July 1930), 477-507; see also ‘Irving's German Tour and Its Influence on His Tales,’ PMLA, XLV (Dec. 1930), 1150-87. Pochmann shows, with parallel texts, that in ‘Rip Van Winkle’ Irving translated and expanded the story of Peter Klaus, a German goatherd who fell asleep for years, which he found in the Volkssagen of Othmar; and in ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,’ he demonstrates Irving's indebtedness to the Rübezahl legends in Volksmärchen der Deutschen, by Musaeus. See also Williams, The Life of Washington Irving (New York, 1935), I, 177-86.

2. Blair, Native American Humor, p. 16, n. 3. Basing his judgment of Irving as a native humorist on the Knickerbocker's History of New York, Blair considers Irving as primarily ‘a disciple of neoclassicism,’ and concludes (p. 14) that ‘he employed a technique which, admirable though it was, differed from that of typical American humor.’ Rourke, American Humor, p. 77.

3. Thomas A. Janvier, The Dutch Founding of New York (New York, 1903), p. 4; Janvier takes issue with Irving's characterization of the Dutch on pp. 1-3, 9, 14, 46, 105, and 131-2.

4. Pochmann, ‘Irving's German Tour,’ PMLA, XLV, 1153-4.

5. Brom Bones was identified by Pierre M. Irving as a wag of Tarrytown who ‘boasted of once having met the devil … and run a race with him for a bowl of milk’ (Life and Letters of Washington Irving, London, 1892, I, 282). See Williams, Life, I, 429, n. 90, for a similar account; on p. 430, n. 91, he names Brom Van Allstyne of Kinderhook as the original of Irving's character. Ichabod Crane, Williams finds (p. 109), was modelled upon ‘Jesse Merwin, the homespun wit’ and village schoolmaster, as well as upon Fielding's Partridge and the schoolmaster in Goldsmith's Deserted Village.

6. ‘Sleepy Hollow,’ in Biographies and Miscellanies, ed. Pierre M. Irving (New York, 1866), pp. 514-16.

7. Thompson, Body Boots & Britches (Philadelphia, 1939), pp. 119-21; Carl Carmer, The Hudson (New York and Toronto, 1939), p. 35, lists some typical pranks.

8. The perfection of Irving's ‘Legend’ becomes even more apparent by comparison with ‘Cobus Yerks,’ Paulding's imitation of ‘Sleepy Hollow.’ Instead of Yankee vs. Backwoodsman, we find a stupid, superstitious Dutchman frightened by a ghostly dog, otherwise Tim Canty, a merry Englishman. Now the story is reduced to its supernatural motif only; the richness which Irving's ‘Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ holds for us, its reverberations on the themes of national and regional character, are entirely lacking in Paulding's caricature. Tales of The Good Woman, ed. W. I. Paulding (New York, 1867), pp. 285-99.

9. Mark Twain's first newspaper sketch was a version of this motif, called ‘The Dandy Frightening the Squatter,’ reprinted in Tall Tales of the Southwest, ed. F. J. Meine (New York, 1930), pp. 447-8; discussed by Bernard DeVoto in Mark Twain's America (Boston, 1932), pp. 90-91.

10. Much later Irving was to return to the frontier materials he used for Brom Bones in ‘The Early Experiences of Ralph Ringwood,’ a fictionalized biography of Governor Duval of Florida (Wolfert's Roost, New York, 1865. pp. 294-341). Some of the supernatural lore from ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ turns up here too, notably an apparition of a horse as a devil (pp. 298-9). Of his late frontier sketches Beach notes, ‘Strange that Irving should have come so close to Longstreet's and Craddock's property! Strange too that he should not have known what to make of it’ (‘Washington Irving,’ University of Kansas City Review, XIV, p. 266). Perhaps the key to this puzzle is that Ralph Ringwood, a Kentuckian, meets only Westerners and hence there is no opportunity for Irving to give this sketch the dramatic power which the conflict of regional characters made possible in ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.’ In view of the popularity, as well as the artistic success, of the earlier sketch, it is indeed surprising that Irving should have followed it with so poor an effort.

11. ‘Paul Bunyan and Rip Van Winkle,’ Yale Review, XXXVI (Autumn 1946), pp. 66-76.