patent, built here a fine house, and adorned his native town. It is not so very many years since Cooper died, and yet the boatmen and loungers about the lake had only the faintest impression of the man-there was a writer by that name, one of them said, and some of his family lived near the house of the great man already referred to. The magician who created Cooperstown sleeps in the old English-looking church-yard of the Episcopal church, in the midst of the graves of his relations, and there is a well-worn path to his head-stone. Whatever the common people of the town may think, it is that grave that draws most pilgrims to the village. Where the hillside cemetery now is, on the bank of the lake, was his farm, which he visited always once and sometimes twice a day. He commonly wrote only from ten to twelve in the morning, giving the rest of the time to his farm and the society of his family. During the period of his libel suits, when the newspapers represented him as morose and sullen in his retirement, he was, on the contrary, in the highest spirits and the most genial mood. “Deer-slayer” was written while this contest was at its height. Driving one day from his farm with his daughter, he stopped and looked long over his favorite prospect on the lake, and said, “I must write one more story, dear, about our little lake.” At that moment the “Deerslayer” was born. He was silent the rest of the way home, and went immediately to his library and began the story. The party returned in a moralizing vein. How vague already in the village which his genius has made known over the civilized world is the fame of Cooper! To our tourists the place was saturated with his presence, but the new generation cares more for its smart prosperity than for all his romance. Many of the passengers on the boat had stopped at a lakeside tavern to dine, preferring a good dinner to the associations which drew our sentimentalists to the spots that were hallowed by the necromancer's imagination. And why not? One cannot live in the past forever. The people on the boat who dwelt in Cooperstown were not talking about Cooper, perhaps had not thought of him for a year. The ladies, seated in the bow of the boat, were comparing notes about their rheumatism and the measles of their children; one of them had been to the funeral of a young girl who was to have been married in the autumn, poor thing, and she told her companion who were at the funeral, and how they were dressed, and how little feeling Nancy seemed to show, and how shiftless it was not to have more flowers, and how the bridegroom bore up-well, perhaps it's an escape, she was so weakly.