she reverently treasures many personal
belongings of her famous grandfather, and also those of her
author-aunt, Susan Augusta Cooper, whose best memorial, however, is the
noble orphanage on the river-bank some ways below. The oaken doors saved
from the flames of the burning Hall served for this new home, which
overlooked the grounds of their old home. The site of the latter is
marked by Ward's "Indian Hunter." Aptly placed, peering through mists of
green toward the author's church-yard grave, he is a most fitting
guardian of the one-time garden of Fenimore Cooper.

[Illustration: THE NEW HOME AND THE OLD HOME.]

[Illustration: INDIAN HUNTER.]

By the generosity of the late Mrs. Henry Codman Potter, this hunter's
domain has been transformed into beautiful "Cooper Grounds"; and here
the red-man of bronze keeps ward and watch over memories that enshrine
the genius of a noble soul whose records of this vanishing race are for
all time.

[Illustration: COOPER GROUNDS.]

A gentleman just from continental Europe in 1851 said of people there:
"They are all reading Cooper." A traveler, returned from Italy about
that time, wrote: "I found all they knew of America--and that was not a
little--they had learned from Cooper's novels." When an eminent
physician who was called to attend some German immigrants asked how they
knew so much of their new-home country, they replied: "We learned it all
from Cooper. We have four translations of his works in German, and we
all read them." February 22, 1852, Charles G. Leland of Philadelphia
wrote of Cooper's works: "There were several translations issued at
Frankfort, Germany, in 1824, in two hundred and fifty parts, a second
large edition in 1834, and a third in 1851. All his works, more than
Scott and Shakespeare, are household words to the German people."
Library records of to-day show no waning of this early popularity of
the "Leatherstocking Tales" and "Sea Stories" of Fenimore Cooper. In
1883 Victor Hugo told General Wilson that excepting the authors of
France, "Cooper was the greatest novelist of the century." It was Balzac
who said: "If Cooper had succeeded in the painting of character to the
same extent that he did in the painting the phenomena of nature, he
would have uttered the last word of our art."

From Hanau-on-Main, Germany, January, 1912, Herr Rudolf Drescher writes:
"Within two years two new translations of Cooper's complete works have
been issued. One at Berlin, the ot