* * * * * When pain and anguish wring the brow, A ministering angel thou! In the ordinary situations in Cooper's novels his "females" were things to patronize and flatter,--for flattery never goes unattended by her sardonic companion,--but in times of stress they showed heroic powers of endurance. The three introduced in the first chapter of "The Spy" were endowed, according to the text, with "softness and affability," "internal innocence and peace," and expressed themselves by blushes and timid glances. The two "lovely beings" of "The Last of the Mohicans" are even more fulsomely described. "The flush which still lingered above the pines in the western sky was not more bright nor delicate than the bloom" on Alice's cheeks; and Cora was the fortunate possessor of "a countenance that was exquisitely regular and dignified, and surpassingly beautiful." In the passage that follows they are not referred to simply, but always with a bow and a smile--"the reluctant fair one," "the dark-eyed Cora," and as they finally disappear on horseback through the woods, the reader is expected not to laugh at the final ridiculous tableau of "the light and graceful forms of the females waving among the trees." Of course the readers to whom Cooper addressed this did not laugh. They realized that in speaking of women he was simply using the conventional language of the day, which was not intended to mean what it said; that he was introducing a pair of normal, lovely girls, and that the best to be required of a normal girl was that she should be lovely--"only this and nothing more." There was no evidence that Cora and Alice had minds; they were not expected to; instead they had warm hearts and "female beauty." Lowell was probably not unfair in his comment: And the women he draws from one model don't vary, All sappy as maples and flat as a prairie. But it must be admitted that in Cooper's time the model was a prevailing one, and that it was only in his old age that women began in any large numbers to depart from it.