m from his aunt,
Mrs. Peter Jay,--the subject of one of these portraits and at one time
mistress of the Jay mansion at Rye. Over one hundred years ago it was
that, from the walls of this rare old home at Rye, Westchester County,
the grace of these ladies on canvas caught James Cooper's thought to use
them, by description, in his coming book, "The Spy." Chapter XIII
describes closely the personal appearance and style of dress of these
portraits. "Jeanette Peyton," the maiden aunt of Cooper's story, owes
her mature charm to the portrait of Mary Duyckinck, wife of Peter Jay.
From the "cap of exquisite lawn and lace," her gown of rich silk, short
sleeves and "large ruffles" of lace which with "the experience of forty
years," also veiled her shoulders, to the triple row of large pearls
about her throat,--all these details are found in Cooper's text-picture
of Jeanette Peyton. His "Sarah Wharton" no less closely follows the
portrait of Mrs. Jay's older sister, Sarah Duyckinck, who became Mrs.
Richard Bancker. Her name Sarah may have been given purposely to Sarah
Wharton of Cooper's story. Cooper was thirty-two when it was written,
and it is not unlikely that Mrs. Jay, then eighty-five years of age, was
pleased with this delicate tribute the young novelist paid to the beauty
of her own and her sister's youth.

[Illustration: LAFAYETTE THEATRE.]

[Illustration: COOPER'S HEROINES.]

Four daughters and a son now shared the author's home life, and in order
to place his little girls in a school and be near his publishers, Cooper
rented a modest brick house on Broadway, across the street from Niblo's
Garden, near No. 585, Astor's home, which was a grand resort of
Halleck and Irving, who wrote there a part of his "Life of Washington."
Cooper's house was just above Prince Street--then almost out of town.

[Illustration: WINDHURST'S NOOK, UNDER THE PARK THEATRE.]

The modern club being then unknown, the brilliant men of the day met in
taverns, and there talked of "everything under the starry scope of
heaven." In the 1820's there was Edward Windhurst's famous nook under
the sidewalk below Park Theatre, where Edmund Kean, Junius Brutus Booth,
Cooper, Morris, Willis, and Halleck made gay and brilliant talk.

In the "Life and Letters of Fitz-greene Halleck," by General James Grant
Wilson, it appears that Cooper was warmly attached to Halleck since
1815, when they first met. Fitz-greene Halleck is credited with taking
Cooper's earlies