their own farms and the manufacture of their own wives; the women were
in primitive short gowns and petticoats, with the venerable sun-bonnets
of Holland origin. The lower part of the valley was cut up into small
farms, each consisting of a little meadow and corn-field; an orchard
of sprawling, gnarled apple-trees, and a garden, where the rose, the
marigold, and the hollyhock were permitted to skirt the domains of the
capacious cabbage, the aspiring pea, and the portly pumpkin. Each had
its prolific little mansion teeming with children; with an old hat
nailed against the wall for the housekeeping wren; a motherly hen, under
a coop on the grass-plot, clucking to keep around her a brood of vagrant
chickens; a cool, stone well, with the moss-covered bucket suspended
to the long balancing-pole, according to the antediluvian idea of
hydraulics; and its spinning-wheel humming within doors, the patriarchal
music of home manufacture.

The Hollow at that time was inhabited by families which had existed
there from the earliest times, and which, by frequent intermarriage, had
become so interwoven, as to make a kind of natural commonwealth. As
the families had grown larger the farms had grown smaller; every new
generation requiring a new subdivision, and few thinking of swarming
from the native hive. In this way that happy golden mean had been
produced, so much extolled by the poets, in which there was no gold and
very little silver. One thing which doubtless contributed to keep up
this amiable mean was a general repugnance to sordid labor. The sage
inhabitants of Sleepy Hollow had read in their Bible, which was the only
book they studied, that labor was originally inflicted upon man as a
punishment of sin; they regarded it, therefore, with pious abhorrence,
and never humiliated themselves to it but in cases of extremity. There
seemed, in fact, to be a league and covenant against it throughout
the Hollow as against a common enemy. Was any one compelled by dire