Right in the path and within ten feet of a snow bank that has not perished for a thousand years, I picked and ate a little strawberry, and as I rested and roamed about a bit, looking down into the brightly blue lake that made the head waters of the Yukon, I gathered a little sun flower, a wild hyacinth and a wild tea blossom for my buttonhole. OUR MOST NOTED NOVELISTS. Illustration: (‡ decoration) JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. THE WALTER SCOTT OF AMERICA. OUR first American novelist, and to the present time perhaps the only American novelist whose fame is permanently established among foreigners, is James Fenimore Cooper. While Washington Irving, our first writer of short stories, several years Cooper’s senior, was so strikingly popular in England and America, Cooper’s “Spy” and “Pilot” and the “Last of the Mohicans” went beyond the bounds of the English language, and the Spaniard, the Frenchman, the German, the Italian and others had placed him beside their own classics and were dividing honors between him and Sir Walter Scott; and it was they who first called him the Walter Scott of America. Nor was this judgment altogether wrong. For six or seven years Scott’s Waverly Novels had been appearing, and his “Ivanhoe,” which was first published in 1820――the first historical novel of the world――had given the clue to Cooper for “The Spy,” which appeared in 1821, the first historical novel of America. Both books were translated into foreign languages by the same translators, and made for their respective authors quick and lasting fame. James Fenimore Cooper was born in Burlington, New Jersey, September 15, 1789――the same year that George Washington was inaugurated President of the United States. His father owned many thousand acres of wild land on the head waters of the Susquehanna River in New York, and while James was an infant removed thither and built a stately mansion on Otsego Lake, near the point where the little river issues forth on its journey to the sea. Around Otsego Hall, as it was called, the village of Cooperstown grew up. In this wilderness young Cooper passed his childhood, a hundred miles beyond the advancing lines of civilization. Along the shores of the beautiful lake, shut in by untouched forests, or in the woods themselves, which rose and fell unbroken――except here and there by a pioneer’s hut or a trapper’s camp――he passed his boyhood days and slept at night among the solemn silence of nature’s primeval grandeur. All the delicate arts of the forest, the craft of the woodsman, the trick of the trapper, the stratagem of the Indian fighter, the wiley shrewdness of the tawny savage, the hardships and dangers of pioneer life were as familiar to Cooper as were the legends of North Britain and the stirring ballads of the highlands and the lowlands to Walter Scott. But for this experience we should never have had the famous Leather Stocking Tales.