In 1826, when "The Spy" was before the footlights in Lafayette Theatre, on Broadway, near Canal Street, Enoch Crosby, the supposed original spy, appeared in a box with friends, and "was given thunders of applause." From "Portraits of Cooper's Heroines," by the Rev. Ralph Birdsall of Cooperstown, is gleaned: On the walls of the Newport home of the Rev. John Cornell hang two old portraits that have close connection with the inner history of "The Spy." To their present owner they came from the New York home of his mother, the late Mrs. Isaac Cornell, and to her they came from the Somerville, New Jersey, home of her father, Mr. Richard Bancker Duyckinck, who in his turn received them from his aunt, Mrs. Peter Jay,--the subject of one of these portraits and at one time mistress of the Jay mansion at Rye. Over one hundred years ago it was that, from the walls of this rare old home at Rye, Westchester County, the grace of these ladies on canvas caught James Cooper's thought to use them, by description, in his coming book, "The Spy." Chapter XIII describes closely the personal appearance and style of dress of these portraits. "Jeanette Peyton," the maiden aunt of Cooper's story, owes her mature charm to the portrait of Mary Duyckinck, wife of Peter Jay. From the "cap of exquisite lawn and lace," her gown of rich silk, short sleeves and "large ruffles" of lace which with "the experience of forty years," also veiled her shoulders, to the triple row of large pearls about her throat,--all these details are found in Cooper's text-picture of Jeanette Peyton. His "Sarah Wharton" no less closely follows the portrait of Mrs. Jay's older sister, Sarah Duyckinck, who became Mrs. Richard Bancker. Her name Sarah may have been given purposely to Sarah Wharton of Cooper's story. Cooper was thirty-two when it was written, and it is not unlikely that Mrs. Jay, then eighty-five years of age, was pleased with this delicate tribute the young novelist paid to the beauty of her own and her sister's youth. [Illustration: LAFAYETTE THEATRE.] [Illustration: COOPER'S HEROINES.] Four daughters and a son now shared the author's home life, and in order to place his little girls in a school and be near his publishers, Cooper rented a modest brick house on Broadway, across the street from Niblo's Garden, near No. 585, Astor's home, which was a grand resort of Halleck and Irving, who wrote there a part of his "Life of Washington." Cooper's house was just above Prince Street--then almost out of town. [Illustration: WINDHURST'S NOOK, UNDER THE PARK THEATRE.] The modern club being then unknown, the brilliant men of the day met in taverns, and there talked of "everything under the starry scope of heaven." In the 1820's there was Edward Windhurst's famous nook under the sidewalk below Park Theatre, where Edmund Kean, Junius Brutus Booth, Cooper, Morris, Willis, and Halleck made gay and brilliant talk.