volumes of Bryant, Halleck, Drake and others, from which he read quotations to prove his assertions of their merits. Almost every prominent American who visited Europe during his seven years’ sojourn abroad brought back pleasant recollections of his intercourse with the great and patriotic novelist. Cooper returned to America in 1833, the same year that Washington Irving came back to his native land. He retired to his home at Cooperstown, where he spent the remaining nineteen years of his life, dying on the 14th day of September, 1852, one day before the sixty-second anniversary of his birth. His palatial home at Cooperstown, as were also his various places of residence in New York and foreign lands, were always open to his deserving countrymen, and many are the ambitious young aspirants in art, literature and politics who have left his hospitable roof with higher ideals, loftier ambitions and also with a more exalted patriotism. A few days after his death a meeting of prominent men was held in New York in honor of their distinguished countryman. ♦Washington Irving presided and William Cullen Bryant delivered an oration paying fitting tribute to the genius of the first great American novelist, who was first to show how fit for fiction were the scenes, the characters, and the history of his native land. Nearly fifty years have passed since that day, but Cooper’s men of the sea and his men of the forest and the plain still survive, because they deserve to live, because they were true when they were written, and remain to-day the best of their kind. Though other fashions in fiction have come and gone and other novelists have a more finished art nowadays, no one of them all has succeeded more completely in doing what he tried to do than did James Fenimore Cooper. ♦ ‘Washingion’ replaced with ‘Washington’ If we should visit Cooperstown, New York, the most interesting spot we should see would be the grave of America’s first great novelist; and the one striking feature about it would be the marble statue of Leather Stocking, with dog and gun, overlooking the last resting-place of his great creator. Then we should visit the house and go into the library and sit in the chair and lean over the table where he was created. Then down to the beautiful Otsego Lake, and as the little pleasure steamer comes into view we peer to catch the gilded name painted on its side. Nearer it comes, and we read with delight “Natty Bumpo,” the real name of Leather Stocking. Otsego Hall, the cemetery and the lake alike, are a shrine to the memory of Cooper and this greatest hero of American fiction. And we turn away determined to read again the whole of the _Leather Stocking Tales._ * * * * * ENCOUNTER WITH A PANTHER. (FROM “THE PIONEERS.”)