ather-Stocking Tales_ have somehow formed an idea of his
person and character. Leather-Stocking is a rare hero in being noble
without being offensive. "Perhaps there is no better proof of Cooper's
genuine power," says Brander Matthews, "than that he can insist on
Leather-Stocking's goodness,--a dangerous gift for a novelist to bestow
on a man,--and that he can show us Leather-Stocking declining the
advances of a handsome woman,--a dangerous position for a novelist to
put a man in,--without any reader ever having felt inclined to think
Leather-Stocking a prig."

Leather-Stocking was first introduced to the public in _The Pioneers_,
the novel descriptive of early days in Cooperstown which Cooper
published in 1823. The character was not yet fully developed, but
Nathaniel Bumppo in outward appearance stood at once complete. "He was
tall, and so meagre as to make him seem above even the six feet that he
actually stood in his stockings. On his head, which was thinly covered
with lank, sandy hair, he wore a cap made of fox-skin. His face was
skinny, and thin almost to emaciation; but yet it bore no signs of
disease; on the contrary, it had every indication of the most robust and
enduring health. The cold and the exposure had, together, given it a
color of uniform red. His gray eyes were glancing under a pair of shaggy
brows, that overhung them in long hairs of gray mingled with their
natural hue; his scraggy neck was bare, and burnt to the same tint with
his face. A kind of coat, made of dressed deerskin, with the hair on,
was belted close to his lank body, by a girdle of colored worsted. On
his feet were deerskin moccasins, ornamented with porcupines' quills,
after the manner of the Indians, and his limbs were guarded with long
leggings of the same material as the moccasins, which, gartering over
the knees of his tarnished buckskin breeches, had obtained for him,
among the settlers, the nick-name of Leather-Stocking."

In this story the novelist had presented Leather-Stocking as a finished
portrait, with his long rifle, dog Hector, and all. Cooper had described
him as a man of seventy years, and intimated no purpose of carrying him
over into another volume. Natty Bumppo proved to be so popular, however,
that in 1826 Cooper made him an important figure in _The Last of the
Mohicans_, representing him in young manhood, at the age of thirty
years, and betrayed a more profound interest in the spirit of the
character which he had