The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

And he was actually away in England, ironically, and homesick whenever he started writing The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

He achieved fame with the publication, The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, which was serialized from 1918 to 1920.

And it contained this story, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

It comes from that book.

And he's

right here in the same vein, you know? That's

only because he like wrote, he like, he was like an editor for like a publication and he put his own shit in the publication just as filler, which I've done as well, but you know, not nearly as successfully.

We didn't make any money.

[gentle music] Well, I really love tonight's, uh, short reading.

It's actually, um, an essay from Washington Irving, and it's from this incredible collection called The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon.

In case you don't fully recognize Washington Irving's name, he did, um, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

Um, we also read a lot of Christmas stories from him in the past.

This LibriVox recording is in the public domain.

Bracebridge Hall may be considered a sort of continuation of the Sketch Book, and comprises various descriptions, essays, and tales relating to English character and habits, and especially as applicable to the olden time.

The position of the author is that of a resident for the time at the Hall; and many of the incidents and scenes of one and another sketch or tale seem to have arisen to his observation during his agreeable sojourn there.

Lady Lillycraft, for example, a visitor to the Hall, has brought with her two pet dogs, which are pictured thus: "One is a fat spaniel called Zephyr, though Heaven defend me from such a Zephyr.

What an incentive to a youngster like me to go on.

And so I thought to myself, Washington Irving, the author of The Sketchbook, in which is the quaint story of Rip Van Winkle.

Rip Van Winkle! There was to me magic in the sound of the name as I repeated it.

Why, was not this the very character I wanted? An American story by an American author was surely just the theme suited to an American actor.

In ten minutes I had gone to the house and returned to the barn with The Sketchbook.

I had not read the story since I was a boy.

I was disappointed with it, not as a story, of course, but the tale was purely a narrative.

Right, because The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is presented as a story found among the papers of the late Diedrich Knickerbocker.

But included in a larger collection called the Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

So he's layering fake identities on top of fake identities.

It's masks all the way down.