This work, the first part more particularly, is a delightful story of adventure. As usual there are startling incidents, perilous situations, and hairbreadth escapes enough to furnish sufficient materials for a dozen ordinary fictions. Yet the probabilities are better preserved than in many of Cooper's novels where the events are far fewer, as well as far less striking. But it is interesting, not merely for the incidents it contains, but for the revelation it makes of the man who wrote it. Expressions of personal feeling and opinion turn up unexpectedly everywhere, and make slight but constantly recurring eddies in the stream of the story. Everything is to be found here which he had ever discussed before. The inferiority of the bay of New York to that of Naples; the miserable cooking and gross feeding of New England; the absolute necessity of a liturgy in religious worship; the contempt he felt for the misguided beings who presume to deny the existence of (p. 250) bishops in the primitive church; his aversion to paper money; his disdain for the shingle palaces of the Grecian temple school; his scorn of the idea that one man is as good as another; these and scores of similar utterances arrest constantly the reader's attention. But they do not jar upon his feelings as in many other of his writings. They are essentially different in tone. There runs through this series a vein of ill-natured amiability or amiable ill-nature--it is hard to say which phrase is more appropriate--which gives to the whole what horticulturists call a delicate sub-acid flavor. The roar of contempt found in previous writings subsided in these into a sort of prolonged but subdued growl. But it is a case in which the reader feels that it is eminently proper that the writer should growl. It is the old man of sixty-five telling the tale of his early years. His preferences for the past do not irritate us, they entertain us. It is right that the world about him should seem meaner and more commonplace than it did in the fever-fit of youth and love, when it was joy merely to live. The work, moreover, has another characteristic that gives it a whimsical attractiveness. It is a tale of the good old times when New York had still some New York feeling left; when her old historic names still carried weight and found universal respect, and her old families still ruled society with a despotic sway; and especially before the whole state had been overrun by the lank, angular, loose-jointed, slouching, shrewd, money-worshiping sons of the Puritans, whose restless activity had triumphed over the slow and steady respectability of the original settlers. The scene of this story, so far as it is laid on land, is mainly in the river counties; but in spite of that fact it is difficult not to think that some recollections of the writer's own youth (p. 251) were not mingled in certain portions of it. Especially is it a hard task