LONDON ANTIQUES.

THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW 作者：华盛顿·欧文投票推荐加入书签留言反馈

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----I do walk

 Methinks like Guide Vaux, with my dark lanthorn,

 Stealing to set the town o ?re; i th try

 I should be taken for William o the Wisp,

 Or Robin Goodfellow.

 FLETCHER.

 I AM somewhat of an antiquity-hunter, and am fond of expl London i of the relics of old times.

 These are principally to be found in the depths of the city, swallowed up and almost lost in a wilderness of brid mortar, but deriving poetical and romantiterest from the onplace, prosaic world around them. I was struck with an instance of the kind in the course of a ret summer ramble into the city; for the city is only to be explored to advantage in summer-time, when free from the smoke and fog and rain and mud of winter. I had been buffeting for some time against the current of populatioing through Fleet Street. The warm weather had unstrung my nerves and made me sensitive to every jar and jostle and discordant sound. The ?esh was weary, the spirit faint, and I was getting out of humor with the bustling busy throng through which I had tle, when in a ?t of desperation I tore my way through the crowd, plunged into a by-lane, and, after passing through several obscure nooks and angles, emerged into a quaint and quiet court with a grassplot in the tre by elms, a perpetually fresh and green by a fountain with its sparkli of water. A student with book in hand was seated on a stone bench, partly reading, partly meditating on the movements of two or three trim nursery-maids with their infant charges.

 I was like an Arab who had suddenly e upon an oasis amid the panting sterility of the desert. By degrees the quiet and ess of the place soothed my nerves and refreshed my spirit.

 I pursued my walk, and came, hard by, to a very a chapel with a low-browed Saxon portal of massive and rich architecture.

 The interior was circular and lofty and lighted from above.

 Around were moal tombs of a date on which were extehe marble ef?gies of warriors in armor. Some had the hands devoutly crossed upon the breast; rasped the pommel of the sword, menag hostility even iomb, while the crossed legs of several indicated soldiers of the Faith who had been on crusades to the Holy Land.

 I was, in fact, in the chapel of the Knights Templars, strangely situated in the very tre of sordid traf?d I do not know a more impressive lesson for the many of the world than thus suddenly to turn aside from the highway of busy money-seeking life, and sit down among these shadowy sepulchres, where all is twilight, dust, and f.et-fullness.

 In a subsequent tour of observation I entered another of these relics of a "fone world" locked up in the heart of the city. I had been wandering for some time through dull monotonous streets, destitute of anything to strike the eye or excite the imagination, when I beheld before me a Gothic gateway of mouldering antiquity. It opened into a spacious quadrangle f the courtyard of a stately Gothic pile, the portal of which stood invitingly open.

 It arently a public edi?ce, and, as I was antiquity-hunting, I ventured in, though with dubious steps.

 Meeting no oher to oppose or rebuke my intrusion, I tinued on until I found myself in a great hall with a lofty arched roof and oaken gallery, all of Gothic architecture. At one end of the hall was an enormous ?replace, with woodeles on each side; at the other end was a raised platform, or dais, the seat of state, above which was the portrait of a man in antique garb with a long robe, a ruff, and a venerable gray beard.

 The whole establishment had an air of monastic quiet and seclusion, and what gave it a mysterious charm was, that I had not met with a human being since I had passed the threshold.

 Enced by this loneliness, I seated myself in a recess of a large bow window, which admitted a broad ?ood of yellow sunshine, checkered here and there by tints from panes of class, while an open caseme in the soft summer air. Here, leaning my bead on my hand and my arm on an old oaken table, I indulged in a sort of reverie about what might have been the a uses of this edi?ce. It had evidently been of monastic in; perhaps one of those collegiate establishments built of yore for the promotion of learning, where the patient monk, in the ample solitude of the cloister, added page to page and volume to volume, emulating in the produs of his brain the magnitude of the pile he inhabited.

 As I was seated in this musing mood a small panelled door in an arch at the upper end of the hall ened, and a number of gray-headed old men, clad in long black cloaks, came forth one by one, proceeding in that mahrough the hall, without uttering a word, each turning a pale fae as he passed, and disappearing through a door at the lower end.

 I was singularly struck with their appearaheir black cloaks and antiquated air ported with the style of this most venerable and mysterious pile. It was as if the ghosts of the departed years, about which I had been musing, were passing in review before me. Pleasing myself with such fancies, I set out, in the spirit of romao explore what I pictured to myself a realm of shadows existing in the very tre of substantial realities.

 My ramble led me through a labyrinth of interior courts and corridors and dilapidated cloisters, for the main edi?ce had many additions and dependencies, built at various times and in various styles. In one open space a number of boys, who evidently beloo the establishment, were at their sports, but everywhere I observed those mysterious old gray men in black mantles, sometimes sauntering alone, sometimes versing in groups; they appeared to be the pervading genii of the place. I now called to mind what I had read of certain colleges in old times, where judicial astrology, geomaneancy, and other forbidden and magical sces were taught. Was this aablishment of the kind, ahese black-cloaked old men really professors of the black art?

 These surmises were passing through my mind as my eye glanced into a chamber hung round with all kinds of strange and uncouth objects--implements of savage warfare, strange idols and stuffed alligators; bottled serpents and monsters decorated the mantelpiece; while on the high tester of an old-fashioned bedstead grinned a human skull, ?anked on each side by a dried cat.

 I approached tard more narrowly this mystic chamber, which seemed a ?tting laboratory for a neancer, when I was startled at beholding a human tearing at me from a dusky er. It was that of a small, shrivelled old man with thin cheeks, bright eyes, and gray, wiry, projeg eyebrows. I at ?rst doubted whether it were not a mummy curiously preserved, but it moved, and I saw that it was alive. It was another of these black-cloaked old men, and, as I regarded his quaint physiognomy, his obsolete garb, and the hideous and sinister objects by which he was surrounded, I began to persuade myself that I had e upon the arch-mago who ruled over this magical fraternity.

 Seeing me pausing before the door, he rose and invited me to enter. I obeyed with singular hardihood, for how did I know whether a wave of his wand might not metamorphose me into some strange monster or jure me into one of the bottles on his mantelpiece? He proved, however, to be anything but a jurer, and his simple garrulity soon dispelled all the magid mystery with which I had enveloped this antiquated pile and its no less antiquated inhabitants.

 It appeared that I had made my way into the tre of an a asylum for superanradesmen and decayed householders, with which was ected a school for a limited number of boys. It was founded upwards of two turies sin an old monastic establishment, aained somewhat of the ventual air and character. The shadowy line of old men in black mantles who had passed before me in the hall, and whom I had elevated into magi, turned out to be the pensioners returning from m, servi the chapel.

 John Hallum, the little collector of curiosities whom I had made the arch magi, had been for six years a resident of the place, and had decorated this ?nal ling-place of his old age with relid rarities picked up in the course of his life.

 Acc to his own at, he had been somewhat of a traveller, having been on France, and very near making a visit to Holland. He regretted not having visited the latter try, "as then he might have said he had been there." He was evidently a traveller of the simple kind.

 He was aristocratical too in his notions, keeping aloof, as I found, from the ordinary run of pensioners. His chief associates were a blind man who spoke Latin and Greek, of both which languages Hallum rofoundly ignorant, and a broken-dowleman who had run through a fortune of forty thousand pounds left him by his father, ahousand pounds, the marriage portion of his wife. Little Hallum seemed to sider it an indubitable sign of gentle blood as well as of lofty spirit to be able to squander suormous sums.

 P.S.--The picturesque remnant of old times into which I have thus beguiled the reader is what is called the Charter House, inally the Chartreuse. It was founded in 1611, on the remains of an a vent, by Sir Thomas Sutton, being one of those noble charities set on foot by individual muni?ce, a up with the quaintness and sanctity of aimes amidst the modern ges and innovations of London. Here eighty broken-down men, who have seeer days, are provided in their old age with food, clothing, fuel, and a yearly allowance for private expehey diogether, as did the monks of old, in the hall which had been the refectory of the inal vent.

 Attached to the establishment is a school for forty-four boys.

 Stow, whose work I have sulted on the subject, speaking of the obligations of the gray-headed pensioners, says, "They are not to intermeddle with any busioug the affairs of the hospital, but to attend only to the service of God, and take thankfully what is provided for them, without muttering, murmuring, ing. o wear on, long hair, colored boots, spurs, or colored shoes, feathers in their hats, or any ruf?an-like or unseemly apparel, but such as bees hospital-men to wear." "And in truth," adds Stow, "happy are they that are so taken from the cares and sorrows of the world, and ?xed in so good a place as these old men are; having nothing to care for but the good of their souls, tod, and to live in brotherly love."

 For the amusement of such as have been ied by the preg sketch, taken down from my own observation, and who may wish to know a little more about the mysteries of London, I subjoin a modicum of local history put into my hands by an odd-looking old gentleman, in a small brown wig and a snuff-colored coat, with whom I became acquainted shortly after my visit to the Charter House. I fess I was a little dubious at ?rst whether it was not one of those apocryphal tales often passed off upon inquiring travellers like myself, and which have brought eneral character for veracity into sumerited reproaaking proper inquiries, however, I have received the most satisfactory assurances of the authors probity, and indeed have been told that he is actually engaged in a full and particular at of the very iing region in which he resides, of which the following may be sidered merely as a foretaste.

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