ances of the
delicate art of the forest, as practised by Natty Bumppo and some of the
other Cooperian experts. Perhaps we may venture two or three samples.
Cooper was a sailor--a naval officer; yet he gravely tells us how
a vessel, driving towards a lee shore in a gale, is steered for a
particular spot by her skipper because he knows of an undertow there
which will hold her back against the gale and save her. For just pure
woodcraft, or sailorcraft, or whatever it is, isn't that neat? For
several years Cooper was daily in the society of artillery, and he ought
to have noticed that when a cannon-ball strikes the ground it either
buries itself or skips a hundred feet or so; skips again a hundred feet
or so--and so on, till finally it gets tired and rolls. Now in one place
he loses some "females"--as he always calls women--in the edge of a wood
near a plain at night in a fog, on purpose to give Bumppo a chance to
show off the delicate art of the forest before the reader. These
mislaid people are hunting for a fort. They hear a cannonblast, and a
cannon-ball presently comes rolling into the wood and stops at their
feet. To the females this suggests nothing. The case is very different
with the admirable Bumppo. I wish I may never know peace again if he
doesn't strike out promptly and follow the track of that cannon-ball
across the plain through the dense fog and find the fort. Isn't it
a daisy? If Cooper had any real knowledge of Nature's ways of doing
things, he had a most delicate art in concealing the fact. For instance:
one of his acute Indian experts, Chingachgook (pronounced Chicago,
I think), has lost the trail of a person he is tracking through the
forest. Apparently that trail is hopelessly lost. Neither you nor I
could ever have guessed out the way to find it. It was very different
with Chicago. Chicago was not stumped for long. He turned a running
stream out of its course, and there, in the slush in its old bed, were
that person's moccasin-tracks. The current did not wash them away, as
it would have done in all other like cases--no, even the eternal laws
of Nature have to vacate when Cooper wants to put up a delicate job of
woodcraft on the reader.

We must be a little wary when Brander Matthews tells us that Cooper's
books "reveal an extraordinary fulness of invention." As a rule, I
am quite willing to accept Brander Matthews's literary judgments and
applaud his lucid and graceful phrasing of them; but that parti