Good evening and thank you for joining me for another boring books for bedtime.

I hope tonight selection provides all the boredom your busy brain needs to quiet down and let you

get some sleep. So find a comfortable spot, adjust your volume, take a nice deep breath in, let it out slowly, and off we go.

Tonight we honor the spooky season with the completion of an American classic,

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving.

Let's pick up right where we left off.

On a fine autumnal afternoon, Icabod, in pensive mood, sat enthroned on the lofty stool from whence he usually watched all the concerns of his little literary realm.

In his hand he swayed of ferrule, that scepter of despotic power.

The birch of justice reposed on three nails behind the throne, a constant terror to evil-doers.

While on the desk before him might be seen, Sundry-Contraband articles and prohibited

weapons detected upon the persons of idle urchins such

as half-munched apples, pop guns, whirligigs, fly cages, and whole legions of rampant little paper gamecocks.

Apparently there had been some appalling act of justice recently inflicted, for the

scholars were all busily intent upon their books, or slyly whispering behind them with one eye kept upon the master, and a kind of

buzzing stillness reined throughout the schoolroom.

It was suddenly interrupted by the appearance of a man in toe cloth jacket and trousers,

a round-crowned fragment of a hat, like the cap of mercury, and mounted on the

back of a ragged, wild, half-broken colt, which he managed with a rope by way of halter.

He came clattering up to the school door with an invitation to Icobad to attend a merry-making or quilting frolic to be held that evening

at Meinair Vantassels and having delivered his message with that air of importance and efforted fine language, which

a man is apt to display on petty embassies of the kind, he dashed over the brook and was seen scampering away up the

hollow, full of the importance and hurry of his mission.

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