personage began to have its effect:-I was getting a fit of the fidgets.

Dinner-time came. I hoped the stout gentleman might dine in the travelers' room, and that I might at length get a view of his person; but no-he had dinner served in his own room. What could be the meaning of this solitude and mystery? He could not be a Radical; there was something too aristocratical in thus keeping himself apart from the rest of the world, and condemning himself to his own dull company throughout a rainy day. And then, too, he lived too well for a discontented politician. He seemed to expatiate on a variety of dishes, and to sit over his wine like a jolly friend of good living. Indeed, my doubts on this head were soon at an end; for he could not have finished his first bottle before I could faintly hear him humming a tune; and on listening, I found it to be "God save the King." "Twas plain, then, he was no Radical, but a faithful subject: one who grew loyal over his bottle, and was ready to stand by king and constitution, when he could stand by nothing else. But who could he be? My conjectures began to run wild. Was he not some personage of distinction, traveling incog.? "God knows!" said I, at my wit's end; "it may be one of the royal family for aught I know, for they are all stout gentlemen!"

The weather continued rainy. The mysterious unknown kept his room, and, as far as I could judge, his chair, for I did not hear him move. In the meantime, as the day advanced, the travelers' room began to be frequented. Some, who had just arrived, came in buttoned up in box coats; others came home, who had been dispersed about the town. Some took their dinners, and some their tea. Had I been in a different mood, I should have found entertainment in studying this peculiar class of men. There were two especially, who were regular wags of the road, and up to all the standing jokes of travelers. They had a thousand sly things to say to the waiting maid, whom they called Louisa, and Ethelinda, and a dozen other fine names, changing the name every time, and chuckling amazingly at their own waggery. My mind, however, had become com

pletely engrossed by the stout gentleman. He had kept my fancy in chase during a long day, and it was not now to be diverted from the scent.

The evening gradually wore away. The travelers read the papers two or three times over. Some drew round the fire, and told long stories about their horses, about their adventures, their overturns, and breakings down. They discussed the credits of different merchants and different inns; and the two wags told several choice anecdotes of pretty chambermaids, and kind landladies. All this passed as they were quietly taking what they called their nightcaps, that is to say, strong glasses of brandy and water and sugar, or some other mixture of the kind; after which they one after another rang for "Boots" and the chambermaid, and walked off to bed in old shoes cut down into marvelously uncomfortable slippers.

There was now only one man left; a short-legged, long-bodied, plethoric fellow, with a very large, sandy head. He sat by himself, with a glass of port wine negus, and a spoon; sipping and stirring, and meditating and sipping, until nothing was left but the spoon. He gradually fell asleep bolt upright in his chair, with the empty glass standing before him; and the candle seemed to fall asleep too, for the wick grew long, and black, and cabbaged at the end, and dimmed the little light that remained in the chamber. The gloom that now prevailed was contagious. Around hung the shapeless, and almost spectral, box coats, of departed travelers, long since buried in deep sleep. I only heard the ticking of the clock, with the deepdrawn breathings of the sleeping topers, and the drippings of the rain, drop-drop-drop, from the eaves of the house. The church bells chimed midnight. All at once the stout gentleman began to walk overhead, pacing slowly backwards and forwards. There was something extremely awful in all this, especially to one in my state of nerves. These ghastly greatcoats, these guttural breathings, and the creaking footsteps of this mysterious being. His steps grew fainter and fainter, and at length died away. I could bear it no longer. I was wound up to the desperation of a hero of romance. "Be he who or what he

may," said I to myself, "I'll have a sight of him!" I seized a chamber candle, and hurried up to No. 13. The door stood ajar. I hesitated - I entered: the room was deserted. There stood a large, broad-bottomed elbow chair at a table, on which was an empty tumbler, and a Times newspaper, and the room smelt powerfully of Stilton cheese.

The mysterious stranger had evidently but just retired. I turned off, sorely disappointed, to my room, which had been changed to the front of the house. As I went along the corridor, I saw a large pair of boots, with dirty, waxed tops, standing at the door of a bedchamber. They doubtless belonged to the unknown; but it would not do to disturb so redoubtable a personage in his den; he might discharge a pistol, or something worse, at my head. I went to bed, therefore, and lay awake half the night in a terrible nervous state; and even when I fell asleep, I was still haunted in my dreams by the idea of the stout gentleman and his wax-topped boots.

I slept rather late the next morning, and was awakened by some stir and bustle in the house, which I could not at first comprehend; until getting more awake, I found there was a mail coach starting from the door. Suddenly there was a cry from below, "The gentleman has forgot his umbrella! look for the gentleman's umbrella in No. 13!" I heard an immediate scampering of a chambermaid along the passage, and a shrill reply as she ran, "Here it is! here's the gentleman's umbrella!"

The mysterious stranger then was on the point of setting off. This was the only chance I should ever have of knowing him. I sprang out of bed, scrambled to the window, snatched aside the curtains, and just caught a glimpse of the rear of a person getting in at the coach door. The skirts of a brown coat parted behind, and gave me a full view of the broad disk of a pair of drab breeches. The door closed-"all right!" was the word

- the coach whirled off:- and that was all I ever saw of the stout gentleman!

CHAPTER III

COOPER

In comparison with other of the early makers of American literature the reputation of James Fenimore Cooper has diminished disproportionately since his death. In the case

of his contemporaries, Irving and Poe, the former has lost nothing during the past fifty years, in critical regard; the latter has immeasurably gained. Cooper, on the other hand, because of the carelessness of his literary methods and the keener appreciation in our day of the defects of technique his work unquestionably shows, has, as was inevitable, come to be regarded largely as a writer for boys,- by some critics at the beginning of the twentieth century he hardly seems to be taken seriously; there is an effect of patronage in references to him. We are speaking, of course, of the critical view of his work, the estimate which endeavors to give him his due place in the bead roll of American letters. His popularity with the general reader is another matter.

Cooper is still secure in a certain popularity; for the breath of life is in some of his stories, and all readers (and surely their name is legion) who like stir and change and excitement in their fiction are likely to swear by him. But, more than this, Cooper has no small significance in our American fiction because he was a stalwart pioneer in a day when such a one had to blaze his own trail; and because, moreover, he

led in the use of distinctively and attractively native material for his books. Certainly praise is due one who had the perception to see the great value of the Indian for the purposes of literary art, and who had the ability to set him picturesquely amidst his native wilds, to show him in his more heroic aspects, whether he be bravely terrible in war-paint, agile for the hunt, or romantic, as he unbends to love beside the far waters of his wood-girdled streams. Cooper is for these reasons still a striking figure in the literary Pantheon. Less perfect in his art than Irving, he is yet in a sense a writer of larger popularity and of more obvious vigor.

He was born in 1789, half a dozen years after Irving, at Burlington, New Jersey, where the Coopers were temporarily residing, while their lands in New York State were being made ready for occupancy—the region which he was again and again to portray in his romances. His mother was of Swedish extraction, and his middle name, Fenimore, which he assumed in maturity, being baptized simply "James," was the name of her family. His father was of Quaker stock, a congressman, a judge, a man of energy and ability who, after the American Revolution, acquired large tracts of land on Otsego Lake (Otsego Lake it is still written) in New York State, and according to the custom of the American pioneer, gradually made the region habitable, so that the town of Cooperstown remains as a monument of the fact. Thither, when the little James was a year old, the family moved. In the preface of his novel "The Pioneers," Cooper tells how "in 1785 the author's father, who had extensive tracts of land in this wilderness, arrived with a party of surveyors. At the commencement of the following year the settlement began. . . . The