"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is comparable to "Rip Van Winkle" only in its use of native American character, scenes, and tradition. It is hardly a short story at all, but rather a prolonged sketch full of "local atmosphere" and partly strung on a narrative thread. Ichabod Crane and his townsmen, except for Brom Bones and his gang, are like Rip in one respect, for they are representative citizens in a town where "population, manners and customs remain fixed; while the great torrent of migration and improvement, which is making such incessant changes in other parts of this restless country, sweeps by them unobserved." Ichabod was an interesting survival, too, because his combination of learning and superstition had come to him from a distinguished source, for he "was a perfect master of Cotton Mather's history of New England witchcraft, in which, by the way, he most firmly and potently believed. He was, in fact, an odd mixture of small shrewdness and simple credulity. His appetite for the marvellous, and his powers of digesting it, were equally extraordinary, and both had been increased by his residence in this spellbound region. No tale was too gross or monstrous for his capacious swallow. It was often his delight, after his school was dismissed in the afternoon, to stretch himself on the rich bed of clover, bordering the little brook that whimpered by his schoolhouse, and there con over old Mather's direful tales, until the gathering dusk of the evening made the printed page a mere mist before his eyes." Ichabod, moreover, is a comic type in American life in the early nineteenth century, who seems to have been equally disliked by all the New Yorkers--the Puritan descendant strayed from home. Cooper's David Gamut is one of the same crop. The story of the Headless Horseman, like that of the Spectre Bridegroom, is, of course, only a make-believe ghost story, neither important nor well told. The real interest in the sketch lies in its picture of simple country life. The whole scene at Baltus Van Tassel's house is as clear and vivid as the contrasting scenes at Bracebridge Hall or as Whittier's picture of another family scene in "Snow-Bound." The third well-known story in "The Sketch Book," "The Spectre Bridegroom," is, like "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," more of a sketch than a story, and does not pretend to be laid on American soil.