53 Wolfert's Roost.
grass-plot, where the motherly hen clucked round with her vagrant brood ; each had its stone well, with a moss-covered bucket suspended to the long balancing-pole, according to antediluvian hydraulics ; while within doors resounded the eternal hum of the spinning-wheel.
Many were the great historical facts which the worthy Diedrich collected in these lowly mansions, and patiently would he sit by the old Dutch housewives with a child on his knee, or a purring grimalkin on his lap, listing to endless ghost stories spun forth to the humming
accompaniment of the wheel.The delighted historian pursued his explorations far into the foldings of the hills where the Pocantico winds its wizard
stream among the mazes of its old Indian haunts; sometimes running darkly in pieces of woodland beneath balancing sprays of beech and chestnut; sometimes sparkling between grassy borders
in fresh, green intervals; here and there receiving the tributes of silver rills which came whimpering down the hill-sides from their parent springs.
In a remote part of the Hollow, where the Pocantico forced its way down rugged rocks, stood Carl's mill, the haunted house of the neighborhood. It was indeed a goblin-looking pile; shattered and timeworn, dismal with clanking wheels and rushing streams, and all kinds
of uncouth noises. A horse-shoe nailed to the door to keep off witches, seemed to have lost its power, for as Diedrich approached, an old negro thrust his head all dabbled with flour out of a hole above the water-wheel, and grinned and rolled his eyes, and appeared to be
the very hobgoblin of the place. Yet this proved to be the great historic genius of the Hollow, abounding in that valuable information never to be acquired from books. Diedrich Knickerbocker soon discovered his merit. They had long talks together seated on a broken
millstone, heedless of the water and the clatter of the mill; and to his conference with that African sage many attribute the surprising, though true story, of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman of Sleepy
Hollow. We refrain, however, from giving further researches of the
Greenburgh Public Library, The Land and People of Greenburgh
