id so,
and enlarging upon my first idea, I arranged the mechanism for keeping
off the flies, and playing a music-box for the amusement of the baby!
This cradle was bought of me afterwards by a delighted peddler, who gave
me his 'whole stock in trade' for the exchange and the privilege of
selling the patent in the State of Connecticut."

This device in various forms and modifications is still familiar in our
households. They had six children, of whom two survive, Mr. Edward
Cooper, recently mayor of New York, and Sarah, wife of Hon. Abram S.
Hewitt, member of Congress from the city of New York. For nearly
sixty-five years this couple lived together in happy marriage.

In 1815 the peace with Great Britain, which gave such ecstasies of joy
to the whole country, ruined Peter Cooper's business; as it was no
longer possible to make cloth in the United States with profit. With
three trades at his finger ends, he now tried a fourth, cabinet-making,
in which he did not succeed. He moved out of town, and bought the stock
of a grocer, whose store stood on the very site of the present Cooper
Institute, at that time surrounded by fields and vacant lots. But even
then he thought that, by the time he was ready to begin his evening
school, that angle of land would probably be an excellent central spot
on which to build it.

He did very well with his grocery store; but it never would have enabled
him to endow his Institute. One day when he had kept his grocery about
a year, and used his new cradle at intervals in the rooms above, an old
friend of his accosted him, as he stood at the door of the grocery.

"I have been building," said his visitor, "a glue factory for my son;
but I don't think that either he or I can make it pay. But you are the
very man to do it."

"I'll go and see it," said Peter Cooper.

He got into his friend's wagon and they drove to the spot, which was
near the corner of Madison Avenue and Twenty-ninth Street, almost on the
very spot now occupied by an edifice of much note called "The Little
Church Round the Corner." He liked the look of the new factory, and he
saw no reason why the people of New York should send all the way to
Russia for good glue. His friend asked two thousand dollars for the
establishment as it stood, and Peter Cooper chanced to have that sum of
money, and no more. He bought the factory on the spot, sold his grocery
soon, and plunged into the manufacture of glue, of which he knew nothing
ex