Among the children of his own friends there was quite a different opinion of Cooper. Elihu Phinney, who was a playmate of the novelist's son Paul, and a frequent guest at Otsego Hall, had an intense admiration for the author of the _Leather-Stocking Tales_, although he long remembered a lesson in table manners, by which, on one of these visits, his host had startled him. At dinner young Elihu passed his plate with knife and fork upon it for a second supply, when from the head of the table came this reprimand: "My boy, never leave your implements on the plate. You might drop knife or fork in a lady's lap. Take them both firmly in your left hand, and hold them until your plate is returned." Half a century afterward Elihu Phinney declared that whatever the ruling of etiquette might be in this matter, he had never since failed to heed this bit of advice from Fenimore Cooper. Mrs. Stephen H. Synnott, wife of a one-time rector of Christ Church in Cooperstown, remembered Cooper as a genuine lover of children. She was Alice Trumbull Worthington, and during the novelist's latter years she lived as a child in the White House on Main Street, nearest neighbor to Otsego Hall. "To meet Fenimore Cooper on the street in the village was always a pleasure," says Mrs. Synnott. "His eye twinkled, his face beamed, and his cane pointed at you with a smile and a greeting of some forthcoming humor. When I happened to be passing the gates of the old Hall, and he and Mrs. Cooper were driving home from his farm, I often ran to open the gate for him, which trifling act he acknowledged with old-time courtesy. His fine garden joined my father's, and once, being in the vicinity of the fence, he tossed me several muskmelons to catch, which at that time were quite rare in the village gardens." To this same little girl, when she had sent him an appreciation of one of his novels, Fenimore Cooper wrote a letter that certainly shows a benignant attitude toward children. "I am so much accustomed to newspapers," he wrote, "that their censure and their praise pass but for little, but the attentions of a young lady of your tender years to an old man who is old enough to be her grandfather are not so easily overlooked.... I hope that you and I and John will have an opportunity of visiting the blackberry bushes, next summer, in company. I now invite you to select your party, to be composed of as many little girls, and little boys, too, if you can find those you like, to go to my farm next summer, and spend an hour or two in finding berries. It shall be your party, and the invitations must go out in your name, and you must speak to me about it, in order that I may not forget it, and you can have your school if you like or any one else. I shall ask only one guest myself, and that will be John,[111] who knows the road, having been there once already."