ition of Nathaniel Shipman of Hoosick Falls.

Natty Bumppo will live forever as a symbolic figure, representative of
certain indigenous qualities in American life. Lowell found in
Leather-Stocking "the protagonist of our New World epic, a figure as
poetic as that of Achilles, as ideally representative as that of Don
Quixote, as romantic in his relation to our homespun and plebeian myths
as Arthur in his to his mailed and plumed cycle of chivalry." Americans
themselves do not realize how widely, in other countries,
Leather-Stocking is still regarded as typical of certain qualities in
the American character. Among Americans who had half-forgotten their
Cooper, there was no little surprise at the exclamation of Gabriel
Hanotaux, member of the French Academy, distinguished author and
statesman of France, when, in the spring of 1917, on the entrance of the
United States into the war against Germany, he expressed his joy in a
message that was cabled round the world, "Old Leather-Stocking still
slumbers in the depth of the American soul!"

There is a point on Otsego Lake, opposite to Natty Bumppo's cave, from
which passing boatmen awaken the famous Echo of the Glimmerglass. For
more than half of the nineteenth century there lived in the village a
negro whose lungs were renowned for their power to call forth the
fullness of this strange echo. "Joe Tom," as he was named, was always
called upon, as the guide of lake excursions, to perform this peculiar
duty. Stationing his scow at the focal point, the negro would shout
across the water, "Natty Bumppo! Natty Bumppo!--Who's there?" And after
a moment the cry would be flung back, as by the spirit of
Leather-Stocking, from the heights of the steep woods and rocky faces of
the hill. On a still summer evening Joe Tom was sometimes able, by a
single shout, to call forth three distinct echoes, which were heard in
regular succession,--the first from the region of the cave, the second
from Mount Vision, and the third from Hannah's Hill on the opposite side
of the lake, until the margin of the Glimmerglass seemed to resound
with cries of "Natty Bumppo!--Natty Bumppo!" uttered by eerie voices.

The years pass, and no other name retains such magic power to wake the
sleeping echo of the Glimmerglass.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 91: _History of Otsego County_, 1878, p. 249.]

[Footnote 92: Calvin Graves, who came to Cooperstown in 1794, and lived
in the place for 84 years, is quoted as sayin