for his change of name to James Cooper Fenimore.  This request was not granted, but the change to “James Fenimore Cooper” was made.  Cooper’s comment on this outcome is a graphic record and “suggests,” says an authority, that “the legislature would do well to assume that a petitioner, in such a case, knew better than they did what he wanted.”  The hyphen, at first used, was soon dropped.  And so it was for his mother’s sake that he made world-wide his fame by the name of James Fenimore Cooper.

[Illustration:  THE FENIMORE BOX.]

“The Fenimore Box” is an “English measure box, curious, and centuries old, brought over by the first of the name.”  It descended to Cooper from his mother, Elizabeth Fenimore, and is now treasured as a family heirloom by his grandson, James Fenimore Cooper of Albany, New York.

[Illustration:  THE SUSQUEHANNA.]

As the first James Cooper and his wife were Quakers, perchance the same Quaker thrift influenced William Cooper to follow the lead of George Washington, who, two years before, in order to find out the inland waterways of our country, came from the Mohawk Valley to the headwaters of the Susquehanna—­this stream which Fenimore Cooper called “the crooked river to which the Atlantic herself extended an arm of welcome.”  Lake Otsego—­the “Glimmerglass”—­William Cooper saw first in the autumn of 1785.  “Mt.  Vision” was covered with a forest growth so dense that he had to “climb a tree in order to get a view of the lake, and while up the tree” he saw a deer come down “from the thickets and quietly drink of its waters near Otsego Rock.”  “Just where the Susquehanna leaves the Lake on its long journey to the sea” this famous Council Rock “still shows its chin above the water and marks the spot where Deerslayer met Chingachgook the Great Serpent of the Delawares.”  Now “its lake margin belongs to a grandson of the author, who also bears his name,” is a record found in Dr. Wolfe’s “Literary Haunts and Homes.”  In the red man’s tongue Otsego means “a place of friendly meeting” of Indian warriors.  The author of “Deerslayer” has immortalized that lake-country in the opening chapter of this book.

[Illustration:  CHINGACHGOOK ON THE COUNCIL ROCK.]

Of this visit to his future home and lands William Cooper has written:  “In 1785 I visited the rough and hilly country of Otsego.  I was alone, three hundred miles from home, without food of any kind.  I caught trout in the brook and roasted them in the ashes.  My horse fed on the grass that grew by the edge of the waters.  I laid me down to sleep in my watch-coat, nothing but the wilderness about me.  In this way I explored the country and formed my plans of future settlement.  May, 1786, I opened a sale of forty thousand acres of land, which in sixteen days were all taken up by the poorest order of men.”  Here William Cooper laid out the site of Cooperstown, which, until 1791, when it became the county-town, was at times also called