fraying the edges. There were now three bullets in that one hole--three
bullets embedded processionally in the body of the stump back of the
target. Everybody knew this--somehow or other--and yet nobody had dug
any of them out to make sure. Cooper is not a close observer, but he is
interesting. He is certainly always that, no matter what happens. And he
is more interesting when he is not noticing what he is about than when
he is. This is a considerable merit.

The conversations in the Cooper books have a curious sound in our modern
ears. To believe that such talk really ever came out of people's mouths
would be to believe that there was a time when time was of no value to
a person who thought he had something to say; when it was the custom
to spread a two-minute remark out to ten; when a man's mouth was a
rolling-mill, and busied itself all day long in turning four-foot pigs
of thought into thirty-foot bars of conversational railroad iron by
attenuation; when subjects were seldom faithfully stuck to, but the talk
wandered all around and arrived nowhere; when conversations consisted
mainly of irrelevancies, with here and there a relevancy, a relevancy
with an embarrassed look, as not being able to explain how it got there.

Cooper was certainly not a master in the construction of dialogue.
Inaccurate observation defeated him here as it defeated him in so many
other enterprises of his. He even failed to notice that the man who
talks corrupt English six days in the week must and will talk it on
the seventh, and can't help himself. In the Deerslayer story he lets
Deerslayer talk the showiest kind of book-talk sometimes, and at other
times the basest of base dialects. For instance, when some one asks
him if he has a sweetheart, and if so, where she abides, this is his
majestic answer:

"'She's in the forest-hanging from the boughs of the trees, in
a soft rain--in the dew on the open grass--the clouds that
float about in the blue heavens--the birds that sing in the
woods--the sweet springs where I slake my thirst--and in all
the other glorious gifts that come from God's Providence!'"

And he preceded that, a little before, with this:

"'It consarns me as all things that touches a fri'nd consarns a
fri'nd.'"

And this is another of his remarks:

"'If I was Injin born, now, I might tell of this, or carry in
the scalp and boast of