The boy had now grown to manhood, and yet no sign of his real work had appeared. He was not especially fond of books or history, his views of the charm of a soldier's life were much those he had spoken to Captain Kent at Otsego Hall. It seemed as though he were settled in the navy. It is strange how chance determined the fate of young Cooper. About this time his grandmother asked him to take her name, and for a while he called himself Fenimore-Cooper. Then a little later he married, and his wife did not like the idea of his leaving her on long sea voyages. He seems to have been quite willing to give up the navy, and settle down at Otsego Hall as lord of the manor after his father's fashion. He liked the life of a country gentleman, and spent his time planting trees, draining swamps, planning lawns, and cultivating flowers and fruits. By the time he was thirty he had tried his hand at almost everything except writing. It happened that as Cooper was one day reading aloud to his wife from an English novel he threw the book down, exclaiming, "Why, I believe I could write a better story myself!" His wife laughed, and asked him to prove it. He said he would, and thereupon sat down and began to lay out a plot. A few days later he was deep in work on the story, and he kept at it until he had finished a two-volume novel, which he called "Precaution." His wife and friends liked it and urged him to publish it; so in November, 1820, appeared the first of that great series of native American stories which were to give the young nation a distinct place in English literature. Chance began them, but the first few books proved so successful that Cooper settled at once into the career of novelist. The famous "Leather-Stocking Tales" followed, and the world made the acquaintance of the America of the Indian and the pioneer in "The Deerslayer," "The Last of the Mohicans," "The Pathfinder," "The Pioneers," and "The Prairie." Here he tells the romantic story of the conquest of the wilderness, and draws the portraits of the pioneer, the hunter, and the Indian. The same character, Harvey Birch, called Leather-Stocking, runs through them all, first as a youth in the novels that deal with the red men, with the great characters of Chingachcook and Uncas, then as a man in the dramas of the white men who blazed the trail westward through the forests, and settled the great prairies. The story of Daniel Boone inspired him in these latter novels, and he tells of such scenes as the great prairie fire and the panther fight with the vividness of an eye-witness. "The Pioneers" is laid on the shores of Lake Ontario where he built the war-ship, and "The Deerslayer" about the little lake near Otsego Hall.