The story opens with a long descriptive passage offered in the
first person by the narrator, who is revealed at the end of the
story to be a man in a tavern who told the story to ‘‘D. K.’’
Irving's contemporaries, and readers of the entire Sketch Book,
know that ''D. K." is Diedrich Knickerbocker, the fictional
author of an earlier book of Irving's. The narrator describes
the story's setting, creating images of a quaint, cozy Dutch
village, ''one of the quietest places in the whole world,’’ in a
‘‘remote period of American history'' that seemed long ago even
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