position in the religious society of which
they form a part.

There was, it must be admitted, some justification for Cooper's feelings
towards New England on the score of retaliation. He had been criticised
from the beginning in that part of the country with a severity that
often approached virulence. He had been denied there the possession of
qualities which the rest of the world agreed in according him.
Cultivated society has always been afflicted with a class too
superlatively intellectual to enjoy what everybody else likes. Of these
unhappy beings New England has had the misfortune to have perhaps more
than her proper share. It was hardly in human nature that the
disparagement he received from these should not have influenced his
feelings towards the region which had given them birth and
consideration.

It is pleasant to turn aside from these scenes and sayings which show
the least amiable side of a nature essentially noble, and pass to one of
the little incidents that are strikingly characteristic of the man. On
board the Sterling, the merchantman on which Cooper's first voyage was
made, was a boy younger than himself. His name was Ned Myers. This
person had spent his life on the sea. He had belonged to seventy-two
crafts, exclusive of prison-ships, transports, and vessels in (p. 248)
which he had merely made passages. According to his own calculation he
had been twenty-five years out of sight of land. After this long and
varied career he had finally landed in that asylum for worn-out
mariners, the "Sailors' Snug Harbor." From here, late in 1842, he wrote
to Cooper, asking him if he were the one with whom he had served in the
Sterling. Cooper, who never forgot a friend, sent him a reply,
beginning: "I am your old shipmate, Ned," and told him when and where he
could be found in New York. There in a few months they met after an
interval of thirty-seven years. Cooper took the battered old hulk of a
seaman up to Cooperstown in June, 1843, and entertained him for several
weeks. While the two were knocking about the lake, and the latter was
telling his adventures, it occurred to the former to put into print the
wandering life the sailor had led. Between them the work was done that
summer, and in November, 1843, "Ned Myers; or, Life before the Mast" was
published. This work has often been falsely spoken of as a novel. It is,
on the contrary, a truthful record, so far as dependence can be placed
upon the word or th