od coach was worth anywhere from three hundred to a thousand
dollars. The work was done by small concerns, where the proprietors and
their 'prentices would turn out three or four vehicles a year. To build
the finest coaches in the world was the ambition of Peter Cooper.

But to get a little needed capital he hired out to a manufacturer of
woolen cloth at Hempstead, Long Island, for a dollar and a half a day. A
dollar a day was good wages then, but Cooper had inventive skill in
working with machinery. He had already invented and patented a machine
for mortising the hubs of wagon-wheels. Now he perfected a machine for
finishing woolen cloth. As the invention was made on the time of, and in
the mill where he worked, he was given only a one-third interest in it.

He went on a visit to his old home at Peekskill and there met Matthew
Vassar, who was to send the name of Vassar down the corridors of time,
not as that of a weaver of wool and the owner of a very good brewery,
but as the founder of a school for girls, or as it is somewhat
anomalously called, "a female seminary."

Peter Cooper sold the county-right of his patent to Matthew Vassar for
five hundred dollars. It was more money than the father had ever seen at
one time in all his life.

The War of Eighteen Hundred Twelve was on, and woolen cloth was in great
demand, the supply from England having been shut off.

Opportunity and Peter Cooper met, or is the man himself Opportunity?

The ratio of marriages, we are told, keeps pace with the price of corn.
On the strength of his five hundred dollars, Peter Cooper embarked on
the sea of matrimony, as the village editors express it. When Peter
Cooper married Sarah Bedell, it was a fortunate thing for the world.
Peter Cooper was a Commonsense Man, which is really better than to be a
genius. A Commonsense Man is one who does nothing to make people think
he is different from what he is. He is one who would rather be than
seem! But a Commonsense Man needs a Commonsense Woman to help him live a
Commonsense Life. Mrs. Cooper was a Commonsense Woman. She was of
Huguenot parentage.

Persecution had given the Huguenots a sternness of mental and moral
fiber, just as it had blessed and benefited the Puritans. The habit of
independent thought got into the veins of these Huguenots, and they
played important parts in the War of the Revolution. Like the Jews, they
made good Freethinkers. They reason things out without an idolatrous
re