"He is gone!" cried Effingham.
Elizabeth raised her face, and saw the old hunter standing, looking back for a moment, on the verge of the wood. As he caught their glances, he drew his hard hand hastily across his eyes again, waved it on high for an adieu, and uttering a forced cry to his dogs, who were crouching at his feet, he entered the forest.
This was the last that they ever saw of the Leather-Stocking, whose rapid movements preceded the pursuit which Judge Temple both ordered and conducted. He had gone far toward the setting sun—the foremost in that band of pioneers who are opening the way for the march of the nation across the continent.
FOOTNOTES:
[65] From Chapter XLI of "The Pioneers." Leather-Stocking was a name given by Cooper to his character Natty Bumppo, who, also, in various works, bore the name of Hawkeye, Pathfinder and Deerslayer. Leather-Stocking appears in five of Cooper's books, which are commonly and collectively known as "the Leather-Stocking Tales." He has generally been accepted as a type of the hardy frontiersman who, in the years following the Revolution, carried civilization westward.
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT
Born in Massachusetts in 1794, died in New York in 1878; studied at Williams College in 1810-11; admitted to the bar in 1815; published "Thanatopsis" in 1816; a volume of "Poems" in 1821; joined the staff of the New York Evening Post, becoming its chief editor in 1829; published another volume of poems in 1832; opposed the extension of slavery; published a translation of Homer in 1870-71; his "Prose Writings" published after his death.