wife, he resigned in May from the navy.  Long afterwards he wrote, “She confesses she would never have done for Lady Collingwood.”  For a year or more Cooper and his wife lived with her father at Heathcote Hill, Mamaroneck, New York, and afterwards in a near-by cottage on the “Neck,” which Cooper named “Closet Hall” because it was so small, and he described it as the home of the Littlepage family in “Satanstoe.”  Only two old willows remain of the group that almost concealed Cooper’s wee house, now entirely rebuilt, and they named the place as the home of Alice B. Havens, who wrote here some of her poems and stories—­so Dr. Wolfe writes of Closet Hall.  After some brief housekeeping in this “wee home,” the young people again made a part of the family at Heathcote Hill, where they lived until 1814.  Then, with the two little girls born to them, they went for a short time to Cooperstown, and thence to their Fenimore farm of some one hundred and fifty acres along Otsego’s southwestern shores.  “On a rising knoll overlooking lake and village a handsome stone house was begun for their life home.”  The near-by hill, called Mount Ovis, pastured the Merino sheep which he brought into the country.  He loved his gardening, and was active for the public good, serving as secretary of the county Agricultural Society, and also of the Otsego County Bible Society.  In the full flush of youth and its pleasures there were the pleasant diversions of driving, riding, and rowing.  So lived flute-playing Cooper, brave and handsome, at twenty-five.

[Illustration:  HON.  CALEB HEATHCOTE.]

[Illustration:  FRAUNCES TAVERN.]

[Illustration:  BURN’S COFFEE HOUSE.]

[Illustration:  HEATHCOTE HILL.]

[Illustration:  TANDEM.]

[Illustration:  COOPER’S FENIMORE FARM HOUSE.]

Cooper’s mother was then living with her older sons at Otsego Hall, and it is recorded that “she took great delight in flowers, and the end of the long hall was like a green-house, in her time”; that “she was a great reader of romances; a marvelous housekeeper, and beautifully nice and neat in her arrangements:  her flower-garden at the south of the house was considered something wonderful in variety of flowers.”  Between her Old-Hall home and the families of her children,—­Richard’s on “Apple Hill,” Isaac’s at “Edgewater,” Nancy’s at the “Old Stone House,” and James’s at “Fenimore,”—­these years were full of charm and interest for them all, which later became sweet and enduring memories.  Sadness crept in, through the loss of James’s daughter Elizabeth; but two more came to lift this shadow in the Fenimore home.