Thirty-odd essays and tales presented as the notebook of Geoffrey Crayon, a genial American traveller, most of them sketches of English life: country Christmases, Westminster Abbey, Shakespeare's Stratford. Two stories, credited to the Dutch-American historian Diedrich Knickerbocker, are set in the Hudson Valley: Rip Van Winkle, who sleeps twenty years in the Catskills, and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, where the schoolmaster Ichabod Crane meets a headless horseman.