21 The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
doughty dough-nut, the tenderer oly koek, and the crisp and crumbling kruller; sweet-cakes and short-cakes, ginger-cakes and honey-cakes,
and the whole family of cakes. And then there were apple-pies and peach-pies and pumpkin-pies ; besides slices of ham and smoked beef;
and moreover delectable dishes of preserved plums, and peaches, and pears, and quinces ; not to mention broiled shad and roasted chickens; together with bowls of milk and cream, all mingled higgledy-piggledy,
pretty much as I have enumerated them, with the motherly teapot sending up its clouds of vapor from the midst—Heaven bless the
mark ! I want breath and time to discuss this banquet as it deserves, and am too eager to get on with my story. Happily, Ichabod Crane was not in so great a hurry as his historian, but did ample justice to every dainty.
He was a kind and thankful creature, whose heart dilated in proportion as his skin was filled with good cheer ; and whose spirits rose
with eating as some men's do with drink. He could not help, too, rolling his large eyes round him as he ate, and chuckling with the possibility that he might one day be lord of all this scene of almost unimaginable luxury and splendor. Then, he thought, how soon he'd
turn his back upon the old school-house; snap his fingers in the face of Hans Van Ripper, and every other niggardly patron, and kick any
itinerant pedagogue out-of-doors that should dare to call him comrade !
Old Baltus Van Tassel moved about among his guests with a face dilated with content and good-humor, round and jolly as the harvest-
moon. His hospitable attentions were brief, but expressive, being confined to a shake of the hand, a slap on the shoulder, a loud laugh,
and a pressing invitation to "fall to, and help themselves."
And now the sound of the music from the common room, or hall,
summoned to the dance. The musician was an old gray-headed negro, who had been the itinerant orchestra of the neighborhood for
more than half a century. His instrument was as old and battered as himself. The greater part of the time he scraped on two or three
strings, accompanying every movement of the bow with a motion of
