Irving sets a dreamy and mysterious stage for this tale of the early Dutch in the Hudson River valley. His ability to create a mood of somnolence and suspension of time is uncanny and beguiling. Irving, in creating this mood, sets up a skillful contrast between the indolent and seductive past and the hurrying future, a contrast that he intends to explore and exploit in this, as in so many of, his stories. Ichabod Crane is the figure of the intellectual, the impractical man of the past, while Brom Bones is the up and coming, roistering new American, Whitmanesque in character. Irving’s sympathies seem to lie with the former, even in his defeat. This delightful and familiar short story is a model for the America coming into being in the early 19th century, an America that Irving view with, at best, ambivalence, but a model that has become a part of our national mythology, reflecting our view of ourselves.