He is an out-of-door creature, intolerant of town life, skeptical of any book but the book of nature, a lover of the woods and mountains, and a worshiper of the God who made them. He has no "theory of life" or of government or of America, but he is just as truly a product of American conditions as the mountain laurel or the goldenrod. Natty Bumppo, central figure of the "Leatherstocking" series, is blood brother to Harvey Birch in "The Spy," to Long Tom Coffin in "The Pilot," to Captain Truck in "Homeward Bound" and "Home as Found," and to a similar man in almost every one of the other stories. Quite in contrast to this "wildflower" is a potted plant, of whom Cooper is almost equally fond. This is the polished gentleman of the world, such as Montcalm, who embodies the culture and manners that the New World needed. Cooper admired such a man almost to the point of infatuation, but presented him very badly; he made an idea of him rather than a living character, a veneer of manners without any solid backing, superficial, complacent, and hollow. One feels no affection for him and very little respect. He annoys one by so evidently thanking God that he is not as other men. Another type is the pedant David Gamut, a man who is made grotesque by his fondness for his own narrow specialty, David, a teacher of psalm-singing, bores the other characters by continually "talking shop," and breaks into melody in and out of season, capping the climax by chanting so vociferously during the massacre that the Indians regard him as a harmless lunatic and spare him then and thereafter. Dr. Sitgreaves of "The Spy," and Owen Bat, the doctor of "The Prairie," are struck from the same die. Finally, among the leading types, must be mentioned the "females." The use of this word, which sounds odd and uncouth to-day, was general a hundred years ago, when "lady" was reserved to indicate a class distinction, and "woman" had not become the common noun; but the change is not merely one of name, for the women of books and the women of life were far less self-reliant than the women of the twentieth century. Then they were frankly regarded not only as dependents but as inferiors. A striking evidence of this can be found in the appropriate pages in Bartlett's "Familiar Quotations." The majority of the quoted passages are culled from poets who wrote before the rise of the woman's movement, and the tone of the passages taken as a whole is distinctly supercilious and condescending. "Women are lovely at their best," the poets seemed to agree, "but after all, they are merely--women. And at less than their best, the least said about them the better." Cooper was by no means behind his time in his attitude; indeed, he was, if anything, rather ahead of it. His feeling for them seems to have been that expressed in the famous passage from "Marmion" of which the first half is usually all that is quoted: O woman! in our hours of ease Uncertain, coy, and hard to please,