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The Random Illustration of the Day for April 1, 2018 is an illustration of Ichabod Crane from Washington Irving’s short story “Sleepy Hollow” by the American artist Edwin Austen Abbey, born April 1, 1852.

Taken from Character Sketches of Romance Fiction and the Drama: A Revised American Edition of the Reader’s Handbook by Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D. and edited by Marion Harland (New York: Selmar Hess, 1896.)

The caption (from the adjoining page):

Ichabod Crane

After E. A. Abbey, Artist

THE cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, bonds that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock, perched upon his spindle neck, to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.

Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”