ength"--a
dwelling ninety feet long and sixteen feet wide, let us say a kind of
vestibule train. The dwelling has two rooms--each forty-five feet long
and sixteen feet wide, let us guess. One of them is the bedroom of the
Hutter girls, Judith and Hetty; the other is the parlor in the daytime,
at night it is papa's bedchamber. The ark is arriving at the stream's
exit now, whose width has been reduced to less than twenty feet to
accommodate the Indians--say to eighteen. There is a foot to spare on
each side of the boat. Did the Indians notice that there was going to
be a tight squeeze there? Did they notice that they could make money by
climbing down out of that arched sapling and just stepping aboard when
the ark scraped by? No, other Indians would have noticed these things,
but Cooper's Indians never notice anything. Cooper thinks they are
marvelous creatures for noticing, but he was almost always in error
about his Indians. There was seldom a sane one among them.

The ark is one hundred and forty feet long; the dwelling is ninety feet
long. The idea of the Indians is to drop softly and secretly from the
arched sapling to the dwelling as the ark creeps along under it at the
rate of a mile an hour, and butcher the family. It will take the ark a
minute and a half to pass under. It will take the ninety foot dwelling a
minute to pass under. Now, then, what did the six Indians do? It would
take you thirty years to guess, and even then you would have to give it
up, I believe. Therefore, I will tell you what the Indians did. Their
chief, a person of quite extraordinary intellect for a Cooper Indian,
warily watched the canal-boat as it squeezed along under him, and when he
had got his calculations fined down to exactly the right shade, as he
judged, he let go and dropped. And missed the house! That is actually
what he did. He missed the house, and landed in the stern of the scow.
It was not much of a fall, yet it knocked him silly. He lay there
unconscious. If the house had been ninety-seven feet long he would have
made the trip. The fault was Cooper's, not his. The error lay in the
construction of the house. Cooper was no architect.

There still remained in the roost five Indians.

The boat has passed under and is now out of their reach. Let me explain
what the five did--you would not be able to reason it out for yourself.
No. 1 jumped for the boat, but fell in the water astern of it. Then No.
2 jump