In 1821 _The Spy, a Tale of the Neutral Ground_, was published; its unqualified good fortune made Cooper a professed man of letters. From that time on until his death, twenty-nine years later, he produced books with uninterrupted regularity. _The Spy_ was followed by _The Pioneers, or the Sources of the Susquehanna_, 1823; _The Pilot, a Tale of the Sea_, 1824; _Lionel Lincoln, or the Leaguer of Boston_, 1825; _The Last of the Mohicans, a Narrative of 1757_, 1826. But one of this group of four can be pronounced a failure and two have had a success almost phenomenal in the history of letters. Cooper shared the American passion for seeing foreign lands. The proceeds of authorship enabled him to carry out a plan he had formed of spending some time abroad. With his family and servants (a party of ten in all), he set sail from New York on June 1, 1826. He proposed to be gone five years. He overstayed that time by two years and five months. From May, 1826, to about January, 1829, he held the ‘nominal position’ of American consul at Lyons. His journeyings were made in a leisurely way after the fashion of the time. Eighteen months were spent in Paris and the vicinity, four months in London, and a few weeks in Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland. The winter of 1828–29 was passed in Florence, and was followed by a voyage to Naples. After spending some months at Sorrento and Naples, he settled in Rome for the winter of 1829–30. Thence to Venice, Munich, Dresden, and finally back to Paris. He published while abroad _The Prairie_, 1827; _The Red Rover_, 1828; _Notions of the Americans, Picked up by a Travelling Bachelor_, 1828; _The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish_, 1829; _The Water-Witch, or the Skimmer of the Seas_, 1830; _The Bravo_, 1831; _The Heidenmauer, or the Benedictines_, 1832; _The Headsman, or the Abbaye des Vignerons_, 1833. In November, 1833, Cooper returned to America. That and several ensuing winters were passed in New York, the summers in Cooperstown. Later he made Otsego Hall his permanent home. He soon became embroiled in quarrels with the press. While in Paris his defence of Lafayette’s position in what is known as the ‘Expenses Controversy’ had provoked from his native land criticism which Cooper resented. He angered a part of the inhabitants of Cooperstown by making clear to them that Three Mile Point (a wooded tract on the lake, long used by the villagers as a picnic ground) was not theirs, as they maintained, but a part of the Cooper estate. With no thought of robbing them of their pleasure park, he insisted on their understanding that they enjoyed its use by favor and not by right.