The heir of Otsego Hall was not such a boy of the wilderness as were Daniel Boone, Andrew Jackson or Abraham Lincoln. He did not have to fight his way in the rough new world as they did. Mr. Cooper was well-to-do, and intended that his son should take a proper place in the young nation. There was little he could learn at the local academy, and so he was soon sent to school at Albany, where he lived in the home of an English clergyman who was fond of denouncing the war of the Revolution and the new country, and so made James Cooper more of an ardent patriot than ever. When he was thirteen he was sent to Yale College, and felt himself almost a grown man. He had been better prepared than most of his classmates, and so decided he did not need to study to keep up with them. Instead of working he devoted all his time to sport, and to wandering through the beautiful country about New Haven. He was learning a great deal about outdoor life, and storing his mind with pictures, but at the same time was learning little of the Latin and Greek which his teachers thought vastly more important. He got into scrape after scrape with other boys of his way of thinking, and finally in his third year a midnight frolic led to his being dismissed. Mr. Cooper took his son's side and argued with the faculty, but the boy had to leave. His father looked about for some means of taming his son's wild habits and decided to send him to sea for a time. Nothing could have pleased James better. He wanted to see the world, and he was fond of ships. He had no special ambition, but rather looked forward to serving in the navy. In the fall of 1806 he sailed from New York on the ship _Sterling_ bound for England with a freight of flour. The voyage was a long and stormy one, and the boy, who was simply a sailor before the mast, got a good taste of life at sea. He enjoyed it thoroughly. When they reached England he went to London in his sailor's clothes, and knocked about that great city much like any other jack on shore. He made friends quickly, enjoyed any new adventure, and stored up a great stock of stories to take home. The boy enjoyed his voyage before the mast so much that when he returned to New York he asked his father to get him a commission in the United States navy. Mr. Cooper was able to do this, and James was soon after sent as midshipman with a party of men to build a brig of sixteen guns on Lake Ontario. It took them a winter to build the ship, and during that time the party stayed at the tiny settlement of Oswego, a collection of some twenty houses. All around lay the unbroken forest stretching thirty or forty miles without a break. There was abundance of game, many Indians, and a splendid chance to live the frontier life that Cooper loved. He now knew the habits of the wild red men and whites, the lore of the woods, the perils and joys of the sea, and as he helped to build the gunboat he learned a thousand things that he was to turn to splendid uses later.