nor his placid countenance, nor his old horse and gig
jogging by. Peter Cooper is dead!"

He had breathed his last about three o'clock that morning, after the
newspapers had gone to press; but the tidings spread with strange
rapidity. When I went out of the house two hours later, the whole city
seemed hung with flags at half-mast; for there is probably no city in
the world which has so much patriotic bunting at command as New York.
Passengers going north and west observed the same tokens of regard all
along the lines of railroad. By mid-day the great State of New York,
from the Narrows to the lakes, and from the lakes to the Pennsylvania
line, exhibited everywhere the same mark of respect for the character of
the departed. A tribute so sincere, so spontaneous and so universal, has
seldom been paid to a private individual.

It was richly deserved. Peter Cooper was a man quite out of the common
order even of good men. His munificent gift to the public, so strikingly
and widely useful, has somewhat veiled from public view his eminent
executive qualities, which were only less exceptional than his moral.

I once had the pleasure of hearing the story of his life related with
some minuteness by a member of his own family, now honorably conspicuous
in public life, and I will briefly repeat it here. More than ninety
years ago, when John Jacob Astor kept a fur store in Water Street, and
used to go round himself buying his furs of the Hudson River boatmen and
the western Indians, he had a neighbor who bought beaver skins of him,
and made them into hats in a little shop near by, in the same street.
This hat-maker, despite his peaceful occupation, was called by his
friends Captain Cooper, for he had been a good soldier of the
Revolution, and had retired, after honorable service to the very end of
the war, with a captain's rank. Captain Cooper was a better soldier than
man of business. Indeed, New York was then a town of but twenty-seven
thousand inhabitants, and the field for business was restricted. He was
an amiable, not very energetic man; but he had had the good fortune to
marry a woman who supplied all his deficiencies. The daughter of one of
the colonial mayors of New York, she was born on the very spot which is
now the site of St. Paul's Church at the corner of Broadway and Fulton
Street, and her memory ran back to the time when the stockade was still
standing which had been erected in the early day as a defense against
the