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This was Cooper's first experience of Riverina, and he swore in no apprentice style that it would be his last. A correlative proof of the honest fellow's Eastern extraction lay in the fact that he was three inches taller, three stone heavier, and thirty degrees lazier, than Thompson. I had known Dixon for many years.
It is full, moreover, of the arguments that irritate but do not convince; and is liberally supplied, in addition, with prophecies that have never been realized. Everything that was disagreeable in Cooper's manner and bungling in his art, was conspicuous in this work. His dislikes were not uttered pleasantly, as in "Afloat and Ashore," but with an ill-nature that often bordered upon ferocity.
In 1815 the peace with Great Britain, which gave such ecstasies of joy to the whole country, ruined Peter Cooper's business; as it was no longer possible to make cloth in the United States with profit. With three trades at his finger ends, he now tried a fourth, cabinet-making, in which he did not succeed.
He gave up the raid for the day, and hurried back to the haunted house by the obscurest route he knew. His mother was gone; but she came back, by and by, with the news of the grand reception at Patsy Cooper's, and soon persuaded him that the opportunity was like a special Providence, it was so inviting and perfect.
In the summer of 1837 Cooper found himself facing the disputed ownership of "Three-Mile Point" of Lake Otsego. On his return from Europe he found that his townspeople regarded this point Myrtle Grove as belonging to them. But Judge Cooper's will left it to all his heirs until 1850, when it was to go to the youngest bearing his name.
"You are right; and I should disgrace my good cause by withholding anything from your inspection. There, sir." And she opened the prayer-book and laid Cooper's dying words before the expert; he glanced over them with an eye like a bird, and compared them with his notes. "Yes," said he, "that is Robert Penfold's writing; and I say again that hand never wrote the forged note."
Yet the latter composed no small share of the class with which Cooper's early associations had lain. He naturally sympathized with them rather than with those who were displacing them. Trade began to seem to him vulgar, and it was doubtless true that many engaged in it, who had become rapidly rich, were vulgar enough. But he made no distinction.
Above all, he loved the red-brown Indians themselves. Full well he knew what trials awaited him. If the reader has formed his conception of the Indians from Fenimore Cooper's novels, he will probably think that Zeisberger spent his life among a race of gallant heroes. The reality was rather different. For the most part the Indians of North America were the reverse of heroic.
Perhaps the most striking case is that of a cuckoo found in New Zealand, known as Eudynamis taitensis. Writing of this cuckoo, Sir Walter Buller says: "Not only has our cuckoo the general contour of Cooper's sparrow-hawk, but the tear-shaped markings on the underparts, and the arrow-head bars on the femoral plumes are exactly similar in both.
In reality, Cooper's soul goes out to the worthless objects he frequently brings together into odd little museums. He loves them precisely because they are insignificant. His whole life has been a silent protest against the arrogance of success, of high merit, of rare value.
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