they were no longer tolerated, or even thought of; not a farmer's daughter but now went to town for the fashions ; nay, a city milliner had recently set up in the village, who threatened to reform the heads of the whole neighborhood.
I had heard enough! I thanked my old playmate for his intelligence, and departed from the Sleepy Hollow church, with the sad conviction that I had beheld the last lingerings of the good old Dutch times, in this once favored region. If any thing were wanting to confirm this impression, it would be the intelligence which has just reached me, that a bank is about to be established in the aspiring little port just mentioned. The fate of the neighborhood is, therefore, sealed. I see no hope of averting it. The golden mean is at an end. The country is suddenly to be deluged with wealth. The late simple farmers are to become bank directors, and drink claret and champagne; and their wives and daughters to figure in French hats and feathers; for French wines and French fashions commonly keep pace with paper money. How can I hope that even Sleepy Hollow can escape the general inundation? In a little while, I fear the slumber of ages will be at end; the strum of the piano will succeed to the hum of the spinning wheel; the trill of the Italian opera to the nasal quaver of Ichabod Crane; and the antiquarian visitor to the Hollow, in the petulance of his disappointment, may pronounce all that I have recorded of that once favored region, a fable.
Geoffrey Crayon.
SPIRIT WITNESSES.
'I never walk abroad in the fields or in the woods, at morn or twilight, or in the sultry noontide, that I do not hear, and feel, and see, that God is within, around, and above me.'
Fuller.
