s, the fine spirits of everybody evoked by the
fresh morning air, and the elevation on top of the coaches, give the
start an air of jolly adventure. Away they go, the big red-and-yellow
arks, swinging over the hills and along the well-watered valleys, past
the twin lakes to Otsego, over which hangs the romance of Cooper's
tales, where a steamer waits. This is one of the most charming of the
little lakes that dot the interior of New York; without bold shores or
anything sensational in its scenery, it is a poetic element in a refined
and lovely landscape. There are a few fishing-lodges and summer cottages
on its banks (one of them distinguished as "Sinners' Rest"), and a hotel
or two famous for dinners; but the traveler would be repaid if there
were nothing except the lovely village of Cooperstown embowered in
maples at the foot. The town rises gently from the lake, and is very
picturesque with its church spires and trees and handsome mansions; and
nothing could be prettier than the foreground, the gardens, the
allees of willows, the long boat wharves with hundreds of rowboats and
sail-boats, and the exit of the Susquehanna River, which here swirls
away under drooping foliage, and begins its long journey to the sea. The
whole village has an air of leisure and refinement. For our tourists the
place was pervaded by the spirit of the necromancer who has woven
about it a spell of romance; but to the ordinary inhabitants the long
residence of the novelist here was not half so important as that of
the very distinguished citizen who had made a great fortune out of some
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