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Updated: June 1, 2025
As the enraptured Ichabod fancied all this, and as he rolled his great green eyes over the fat meadow lands, the rich fields of wheat, of rye, of buckwheat, and Indian corn, and the orchards burdened with ruddy fruit, which surrounded the warm tenement of Van Tassel, his heart yearned after the damsel who was to inherit these domains, and his imagination expanded with the idea, how they might be readily turned into cash, and the money invested in immense tracts of wild land, and shingle palaces in the wilderness.
Brom, who had a degree of rough chivalry in his nature, would fain have carried matters to open warfare, and have settled their pretensions to the lady according to the mode of those most concise and simple reasoners, the knights-errant of yore by single combat; but Ichabod was too conscious of the superior might of his adversary to enter the lists against him: he had overheard a boast of Bones, that he would "double the schoolmaster up and lay him on a shelf of his own school-house;" and he was too wary to give him an opportunity.
Here again, on this island, you may dine and drink and listen to good music. You may also shoot at glass balls with an air-gun. Ichabod! Wherever there is a good navigable river, there you have many occasions for excursions. Steamers of all sizes, painted in the national colours of Bohemia, white and red, ply up and down the Vltava.
Alas! if we may use a homely phrase, many are the victims to strait-lacing, both of stays and conscience! But if the old, grey-bearded Ichabod had been an object of dislike to the youthful and self-willed Jewess before she saw Sir Willmott Burrell, how did she regard him afterwards!
'Come, now, he said, 'you backbiting, scandal-mongering old liar! What does the Mountain do? Out with it! 'Why, nayther thee nor me was there at the time, gaffer, responded Ichabod, his frosty features still creased with a grin. 'So nayther thee nor me can talk for certain. Can us?
He beckoned him from his nest, sat with him by the hour on a broken mill-stone, by the side of the waterfall, heedless of the noise of the water, and the clatter of the mill; and I verily believe it was to his conference with this African sage, and the precious revelations of the good dame of the spinning-wheel, that we are indebted for the surprising though true history of Ichabod Crane and the headless horseman, which has since astounded and edified the world.
The old country wives, however, who are the best judges of these matters, maintain to this day that Ichabod was spirited away by supernatural means; and it is a favorite story often told about the neighborhood round the intervening fire.
In one part of the road leading to the church was found the saddle trampled in the dirt; the tracks of horses' hoofs, deeply dented in the road and evidently at furious speed, were traced to the bridge, beyond which, on the bank of a broad part of the brook, where the water ran deep and black, was found the hat of the unfortunate Ichabod, and close beside it a spattered pumpkin.
Whittier's poem "Ichabod" seemed to have been aimed at him, especially in its third stanza: "Oh, dumb be passion's stormy rage, When he who might Have lighted up and led his age, Falls back in night." Amid the lurid gleams and heat of such a disappointment, men cannot see clearly. They impute wrong motives, base motives, to the backslider.
"Let us bless heaven that the patriarch of the Gnosis has selected the former." It is possibly showing gratitude for small mercies, because our friend has saved his reason, but is blood-guilty in the matter of common sense. Meanwhile, the widowed Gnosis illuminates its Ichabod in the cryptic quartiers of Paris, Lyons, and so forth.
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