sibility that prevented his being a novelist; and at
other times he declared his intent to take up music as a profession as
soon as he had gotten all of his securities properly tied up. And
whether John Jacob worked out his dreams or not, there is no doubt that
they added to his peace, happiness and length of days. Happy indeed is
the man who escapes the critics by leaving his literary masterpiece in
the ink.

PETER COOPER

Let our schools teach the nobility of labor and the beauty of human
service, but the superstitions of ages past--never!

--_Peter Cooper_

[Illustration: PETER COOPER]

Peter Cooper was born in New York City in the year Seventeen Hundred
Ninety-one. He lived to be ninety-two years old, passing out in Eighteen
Hundred Eighty-three.

He was, successively, laborer, clerk, mechanic, inventor, manufacturer,
financier, teacher, philanthropist and philosopher.

If Robert Owen was the world's first modern merchant, Peter Cooper was
America's first businessman. He seems to have been the first prominent
man in the United States to abandon that legal wheeze, "Caveat emptor."
In fact, he worked for the buyer, and considered the other man's
interests before he did his own. He practised the Golden Rule and made
it pay, while the most of us yet regard it as a kind of interesting
experiment. I have said a few oblique things about city-bred boys and
city people in general, but I feel like apologizing for them and doing
penance when I think of restless, tireless, eager, brave, honest and
manly Peter Cooper.

When that New York City woman, last week, observing a beautiful brass
model of an Oliver Plow on my mantel, asked me, "What is this musical
instrument?" she proved herself not of the Peter Cooper tribe. She was
the other kind--the kind that seeing the pollywogs remarks, "Oh, how
lovely--they will all be butterflies next week!" Or, "Which cow is it
that gives the butter-milk?" a question that once made Nathan Straus
walk on his hands.

Although Peter Cooper was born in New York City and had a home there
most of his life, he loved the country, and for many years made Sunday
sacred for the woods and fields. Yet as a matter of strictest truth let
it be stated that, although Peter Cooper was born in New York City, when
he was two years old, like Bill Nye, he persuaded his parents to move.
The family gravitated to the then little village of P