ting in the hamlet on every side had (p. 005)
terrors to some as real as were its attractions to others. Its
recesses were still the refuge of the deer; but they were also the
haunt of the wildcat, the wolf, and the bear. All these characteristics
of his early home made deep impression upon a nature fond of
adventure, and keenly susceptible to the charm of scenery. When
afterward in the first flush of his fame Cooper set out to revive the
memory of the days of the pioneers, he said that he might have chosen
for his subject happier periods, more interesting events, and possibly
more beauteous scenes, but he could not have taken any that would lie
so close to his heart. The man, indeed, never forgot what had been
dear to the boy; and to the spot where his earliest years were spent
he returned to pass the latter part of his life.

The original settlement, moreover, was composed of a more than usually
singular mixture of the motley crowd that always throngs to the
American frontier. The shock of convulsions in lands far distant
reached even to the highland valley shut in by the Otsego hills.
Representatives of almost every nationality in Christendom and
believers in almost every creed, found in it an asylum or a home. Into
this secluded haven drifted men whose lives had been wrecked in the
political storms that were then shaking Europe. Frenchmen, Dutchmen,
Germans, and Poles, came and tarried for a longer or shorter time.
Here Talleyrand, then an exile, spent several days with Cooper's
father, and, true to national instinct, wrote, according to local
tradition, complimentary verses, still preserved, on Cooper's sister.
An ex-captain of the British army was one of the original merchants of
the place. An ex-governor of Martinique was for a time the village (p. 006)
grocer. But the prevailing element in the population were the men of
New England, born levelers of the forest, the greatest wielders of the
axe the world has ever known. Over the somewhat wild and turbulent
democracy, made up of materials so diverse, the original proprietor
reigned a sort of feudal lord, rather by moral qualities than by any
conceded right.

Cooper's early instruction was received in the village school, carried
on in a building erected in 1795, and rejoicing in the somewhat
pretentious name of the Academy. The country at that time, however,
furnished few facilities for higher education anywhere; on the
frontier there were necessarily none