a better story myself!" His wife laughed, and asked him to
prove it. He said he would, and thereupon sat down and began to lay out
a plot. A few days later he was deep in work on the story, and he kept
at it until he had finished a two-volume novel, which he called
"Precaution."

His wife and friends liked it and urged him to publish it; so in
November, 1820, appeared the first of that great series of native
American stories which were to give the young nation a distinct place in
English literature. Chance began them, but the first few books proved
so successful that Cooper settled at once into the career of novelist.

The famous "Leather-Stocking Tales" followed, and the world made the
acquaintance of the America of the Indian and the pioneer in "The
Deerslayer," "The Last of the Mohicans," "The Pathfinder," "The
Pioneers," and "The Prairie." Here he tells the romantic story of the
conquest of the wilderness, and draws the portraits of the pioneer, the
hunter, and the Indian. The same character, Harvey Birch, called
Leather-Stocking, runs through them all, first as a youth in the novels
that deal with the red men, with the great characters of Chingachcook
and Uncas, then as a man in the dramas of the white men who blazed the
trail westward through the forests, and settled the great prairies.

The story of Daniel Boone inspired him in these latter novels, and he
tells of such scenes as the great prairie fire and the panther fight
with the vividness of an eye-witness. "The Pioneers" is laid on the
shores of Lake Ontario where he built the war-ship, and "The Deerslayer"
about the little lake near Otsego Hall.

He wrote great tales of the sea also, in one of which, "The Pilot," he
took as his hero John Paul Jones, tales founded on his own knowledge of
a sailor's life won at first hand; but it was the Indian tales that
brought him greatest fame. Whether the pictures of the men of the Six
Nations be accurate or not they made direct appeal to the imagination of
the world, and Indian character will always stand as Cooper drew it.
Shakespeare and Scott have made English history for us, and Cooper has
done the same thing for the history of the Indian.

Cooper said later that he might have chosen happier periods for his
stories, more stirring events, and perhaps more beautiful scenes, but
none which would have lain so close to his heart. He never forgot what
had interested him so deeply in his boyhood, and when he wrote he we