tal to this history, however, it is to be narrated that
Captain Cooper was one of those trading skippers who carried their own
merchandise in their own vessels which they sailed themselves, and on
whose decks they did their own bartering. His vessel was a swift,
large schooner, the _Eliza Cooper_, _of Philadelphia_, named for his
wife. His cruising grounds were the West India Islands, and his
merchandise was flour and corn meal ground at the Brandywine Mills at
Wilmington, Delaware.

During the War of 1812 he had earned, as was very well known, an
extraordinary fortune in this trading; for flour and corn meal sold at
fabulous prices in the French, Spanish, Dutch, and Danish islands, cut
off, as they were, from the rest of the world by the British blockade.

The running of this blockade was one of the most hazardous maritime
ventures possible, but Captain Cooper had met with such unvaried
success, and had sold his merchandise at such incredible profit that,
at the end of the war, he found himself to have become one of the
wealthiest merchants of his native city.

It was known at one time that his balance in the Mechanics' Bank was
greater than that of any other individual depositor upon the books,
and it was told of him that he had once deposited in the bank a chest
of foreign silver coin, the exchanged value of which, when translated
into American currency, was upward of forty-two thousand dollars--a
prodigious sum of money in those days.

In person, Captain Cooper was tall and angular of frame. His face was
thin and severe, wearing continually an unsmiling, mask-like
expression of continent and unruffled sobriety. His manner was dry and
taciturn, and his conduct and life were measured to the most absolute
accord with the teachings of his religious belief.

He lived in an old-fashioned house on Front Street below Spruce--as
pleasant, cheerful a house as ever a trading captain could return to.
At the back of the house a lawn sloped steeply down toward the river.
To the south stood the wharf and storehouses; to the north an orchard
and kitchen garden bloomed with abundant verdure. Two large chestnut
trees sheltered the porch and the little space of lawn, and when you
sat under them in the shade you looked down the slope between two rows
of box bushes directly across the shining river to the Jersey shore.

At the time of our story--that is, about the year 1820--this property
had increased very greatly in value, but i