and vengeance, while his sweet girl-wife, "Dew-of-June," shows, true to life, an Indian woman's unfaltering devotion to her savage lord. Over all its pages broods the commanding spirit of "The Deerslayer,"—the forest's young Bayard who has yet to learn what the taking of human life is like. So, in "The Deerslayer," printed in 1841, the "Little Lake" (Otsego), with its picturesque shores, capes, and forest-crowned heights, was made classic soil. Just back of "The Five-Mile Point."—where Deerslayer gave himself up to merciless Indian justice at the Huron Camp, and later was rescued by British regulars—is the rocky gorge, Mohican Glen, through which a purling brook ripples by its stone-rift banks thatched with great clumps of rose and fern. From the gravel-strewn shore of Hutter's Point beyond, the eyes of Leatherstocking first fell upon the Glimmerglass, and impressed by its wonder and beauty he exclaimed: "This is grand! 't is solemn! 't is an edication of itself." Leaning on his rifle and gazing in every direction, he added: "Not a tree disturbed, but everything left to the ordering of the Lord, to live and die, to His designs and laws! This is a sight to warm the heart."
The tribes, hunters, and trappers had their "own way of calling things," and "seeing the whole basin, often fringed with pines, would throw back the hills that hung over it," they "got to calling the place the 'Glimmerglass.'" At Gravelly Point opposite, Deerslayer killed his first Indian, and above are the tree-tops where rose the star that timed Hist's meeting with her lover. Some distance to the north is the spot—now known as the "Sunken Islands"—which marks the site of Muskrat Castle, and is near the last resting-place of Hetty Hutter and her mother. And far to the southwest lies a long, low, curving beach jutting sickle-shape into the lake. As a favored haunt of muskrats, it was once called Muskrat Cove, and now Blackbird Bay. Just beyond lies Fenimore, the home of Cooper's early married life.
In the author's pages on England, published in 1837, was expressed a wish to write a story on "the teeming and glorious naval history of that land." Our own country at that time had no fleet, but Cooper's interest in his youthful profession made quite fitting to himself the words of his old shipmate, Ned Myers: "I can say conscientiously that if my life were to be passed
over again it would he passed in the navy—God bless the flag!" Out of England's long naval records Cooper made "The Two Admirals," an old-time, attractive story of the evolution of fleets, and the warm friendship between two strong-hearted men in a navy full of such, and at a time before the days of steam. "Cooper's ships live," so says Captain Mahan; and continues: "They are handled as ships then were, and act as ships still would act under the circumstances." This naval historian thought "the water a noble field for the story-teller." "The Two Admirals" first appeared in Graham's Magazine, for which Cooper was regularly engaged to write in 1842. On June 16 of this year a decision was rendered in the "Naval History" dispute. One of the questions was whether Cooper's account of the battle of Lake Erie was accurate and fair and did justice to the officers in command, and whether he was right in asserting that Elliott, second in command, whom Perry at first warmly commended and later preferred charges against, did his duty in that action. Cooper maintained that while Perry's victory in 1813 had won for himself, "as all the world knows, deathless glory," injustice
had been done to Elliott. Three arbitrators chosen by the parties to the dispute decided that Cooper had fulfilled his duty as an historian; that "the narrative of his battle of Lake Erie was true; that it was impartial"; and that his critics' "review was untrue, not impartial"; and that they "should publish this decision in New York, Washington, and Albany papers." Later Commodore Elliott presented Cooper with a bronze medal for this able and disinterested "defense of his brother-sailor."
