legal matters with Judge Nelson, as
well as political affairs of state. Both were fond of farming and rural
pursuits, and as their farms lay on opposite sides of the lake, Judge
Nelson's at Fenimore, and Cooper's at the Chalet, they were able
frequently to compare notes of their success as agriculturists, perhaps
with the more interest because Cooper himself had formerly owned the
farm at Fenimore.

Judge Nelson was not seldom seen on horseback in Cooperstown, and
continued this form of exercise long after he had passed the limit of
three score years and ten. In his later years he was described as a
broad-shouldered and magnificent figure, with a massive head crowned
with a wealth of gray hair. He was simple and unaffected in his manners,
and never assumed any magniloquence because of his exalted position. On
returning from Washington to Cooperstown for the summer, he seemed to
delight in holding a kind of indiscriminate levee in the main street of
the village, greeting old neighbors, shopkeepers, and farmers alike,
and remembering most of them by their Christian names. In those days the
merchants were accustomed to leave their empty packing-boxes on the
sidewalk in front of their shops, and it was no uncommon sight to see
this Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States seated carelessly
on a dry-goods box, while he chatted with a group of admiring villagers.
His conversation was always entertaining, not only because of his wealth
of mind, but on account of his prodigious memory of men and events. His
gift of memory was undoubtedly of great use to him on the bench, for he
could restate complicated facts in cases so long since heard by him that
the issues had been forgotten by the counsel concerned in them.

Judge Nelson was for many years a vestryman, and later a warden, of
Christ Church in Cooperstown. In his day there was no thoroughfare
through the Cooper Grounds, and he walked to church by way of River
Street. Above the stone wall on the west side of River Street was an
abundant growth of tansy. It was Judge Nelson's invariable habit to pick
a sprig of tansy on his way to Sunday morning service, and he entered
the church absently holding the pungent herb to his nostrils, as he made
his way to the pew now marked by a tablet in the north transept.

On February 13, 1873, the honors paid to Judge Nelson on his retirement
from the bench of the United States Supreme Court were of a character
never before known i