The imagery used to depict the dilapidated house that Tom shares with his wife at the beginning of the story gives the reader some clues as to their unsavory personalities— especially Tom's greedy nature.
They lived in a forlorn-looking house that stood alone and had an air of starvation. A few straggling savintrees, emblems of sterility, grew near it; no smoke ever curled from its chimney; no traveller stopped at its door. A miserable horse, whose ribs were as articulate as the bars of a gridiron, stalked about a field, where a thin carpet of moss, scarcely covering the ragged beds of pudding-stone, tantalized and balked his hunger; and sometimes he would lean his head over the fence, look piteously at the passerby, and seem to petition deliverance from this land of famine.
This is no picture of a comfortable, pleasant farmhouse, with a loving family gathering around a warm fire, and a healthy garden filled with flowers and vegetables. Instead, every visual detail reminds readers of Tom’s miserly nature and the negative effects of that miserliness. Through Irving’s sketch of their home, readers learn that Tom and his wife live an antisocial existence with no friends or guests, and that they are too greedy to maintain household comforts such as a fire. They also neglect their starving horse—whose condition is clear from the striking simile "ribs [...] as articulate as the bars of a gridiron"—which is forced to rely on the occasional generosity of strangers.
It is almost as if Tom’s greed has sucked the life out of his immediate surroundings, leaving them sickly and decayed. The only plants that are able to survive near the house are some “straggling savintrees,” a poisonous form of juniper, and a thin layer of moss, which requires very little to survive. Even the house itself is imagined by Irving as having an “air of starvation,” as if it isn’t getting enough sustenance. These sensory details combine to suggest that the house is indeed fitting for a greedy man such as Tom.
The swamp, which serves as a major setting within the story, is depicted with vivid imagery in order to create a dark and foreboding atmosphere.
The swamp was thickly grown with great, gloomy pines and hemlocks, some of them ninety feet high, which made it dark at noonday and a retreat for all the owls of the neighborhood. It was full of pits and quagmires, partly covered with weeds and mosses, where the green surface often betrayed the traveller into a gulf of black, smothering mud; there were also dark and stagnant pools, the abodes of the tadpole, the bull-frog, and the water-snake, where the trunks of pines and hemlocks lay half-drowned, half-rotting, looking like alligators sleeping in the mire.
The swamp, the site of an earlier massacre of Native Americans, is an ominous location in the tale, a physical reminder of the violence that often accompanied colonial expansion into New England. With its high, thick pine trees that block out the sun, the swamp is home to all manner of animals with negative or “spooky” associations, including owls, frogs, and snakes. Irving even evokes alligators, which are not native to the region at all, in a simile which adds to the passage's ominous, uncanny feel. Worst yet, the swamp is home to Old Scratch, and the spiritual “trap” that he sets up for Tom is mirrored in the “pits and quagmires” that entrap and smother unsuspecting travelers who are fooled by deceptively perilous, moss-covered surfaces.
The imagery used here emphasizes that the swamp, shrouded in perpetual night, is not quite an “ordinary” place, like the bustling city of Boston; rather, it's a space “beyond” or “outside” of the ordinary, where strange and impossible things might occur.
