later; and at--but choose for
yourself; you can't go amiss.

If Cooper had been an observer his inventive faculty would have worked
better; not more interestingly, but more rationally, more plausibly.
Cooper's proudest creations in the way of "situations" suffer noticeably
from the absence of the observer's protecting gift. Cooper's eye was
splendidly inaccurate. Cooper seldom saw anything correctly. He saw
nearly all things as through a glass eye, darkly. Of course a man who
cannot see the commonest little every-day matters accurately is working
at a disadvantage when he is constructing a "situation." In the
Deerslayer tale Cooper has a stream which is fifty feet wide where it
flows out of a lake; it presently narrows to twenty as it meanders along
for no given reason; and yet when a stream acts like that it ought to be
required to explain itself. Fourteen pages later the width of the
brook's outlet from the lake has suddenly shrunk thirty feet, and become
"the narrowest part of the stream." This shrinkage is not accounted for.
The stream has bends in it, a sure indication that it has alluvial banks
and cuts them; yet these bends are only thirty and fifty feet long. If
Cooper had been a nice and punctilious observer he would have noticed
that the bends were oftener nine hundred feet long than short of it.

Cooper made the exit of that stream fifty feet wide, in the first place,
for no particular reason; in the second place, he narrowed it to less
than twenty to accommodate some Indians. He bends a "sapling" to the
form of an arch over this narrow passage, and conceals six Indians in its
foliage. They are "laying" for a settler's scow or ark which is coming
up the stream on its way to the lake; it is being hauled against the
stiff current by a rope whose stationary end is anchored in the lake; its
rate of progress cannot be more than a mile an hour. Cooper describes
the ark, but pretty obscurely. In the matter of dimensions "it was
little more than a modern canal-boat." Let us guess, then, that it was
about one hundred and forty feet long. It was of "greater breadth than
common." Let us guess, then, that it was about sixteen feet wide. This
leviathan had been prowling down bends which were but a third as long as
itself, and scraping between banks where it had only two feet of space
to spare on each side. We cannot too much admire this miracle.
A low-roofed log dwelling occupies "two-thirds of the ark's l