Fenimore Cooper died less than two months later, on Sunday, September 14, 1851, aged sixty-two years lacking one day. The body lay in state at Otsego Hall, and on Wednesday the funeral services were held in Christ Church, the interment being made in the Cooper plot in Christ churchyard. This grave, covered by the prostrate slab of marble marked by a cross, and bearing an inscription that sets forth nothing beyond the novelist's name, with dates of birth and death, has become a shrine of literary pilgrimage. The hurried tourist is disappointed in not being greeted by some conspicuous monument to beckon him at once to the famous tomb; but a more genuine tribute to the novelist's memory appears when the visitor's eye lights upon the path leading from the gate of the enclosure, and deeply worn in the sod by the feet of wayfarers in many a long journey, through the years, to Cooper's grave. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 102: _James Fenimore Cooper_, by Mary E. Phillips, p. 262.] [Footnote 103: In 1826 he applied to the legislature to change his name to James Cooper Fenimore, since there were no men of his mother's family to continue the name. The request was not granted, but the change was made to James Fenimore-Cooper. He soon dropped the hyphen.] [Footnote 104: Now in the hall at Fynmere, the home built in Cooperstown by the novelist's grandson, James Fenimore Cooper of Albany.] [Footnote 105: _James Fenimore Cooper_, by Thomas R. Lounsbury, American Men of Letters series, p. 80.] [Footnote 106: Now at Fynmere.] [Footnote 107: Now at Edgewater.] [Footnote 108: _Pages and Pictures_, Susan Fenimore Cooper, p. 322.] [Footnote 109: _James Fenimore Cooper_, W. B. Shubrick Clymer, p. 90.] [Footnote 110: Livermore, p. 204.] [Footnote 111: John Worthington, afterward United States Consul in Malta.] [Footnote 112: Lounsbury.] [Footnote 113: Cooperstown Centennial Book, p. 133.] [Footnote 114: _Reminiscences_, Elihu Phinney, 1890.] CHAPTER XV MR. JUSTICE NELSON Samuel Nelson, LL.D., who became a resident of Cooperstown in 1824, made this village his home for nearly fifty years. At the time of his death in 1873, he had long been recognized not only as the first citizen of Cooperstown, but as a man of national reputation.