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 earliest books to Europe in 1822 and finding a London publisher for them.  The novelist called his friend “The Admirable Croaker,” on account of a series of amusing and satirical verses written by Halleck and Drake and published over the signature of “Croaker and Co.,” in the public press of that day.  Into this atmosphere of charm came delightful and delighting Joseph Rodman Drake, with his “six feet two” of splendid youth; he was thought by some “the handsomest man in New York.”  From out this brilliant group comes the record that “‘Culprit Fay,’ written in August, 1816,” says Halleck, “came from Cooper, Drake, DeKay, and Halleck, speaking of Scottish streams and their inspiration for poetry.  Cooper and Halleck thought our American rivers could claim no such tribute of expression.  Drake differed from his friends and made good his stand by producing in three days ‘The Culprit Fay’ from the Highlands of the Hudson; but,” is added, “the Sound from Hunt’s Point, his familiar haunt of salt water, made his inspiration.”

[Illustration:  JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, 1822.]

[Illustration:  FITZ-GREENE HALLECK.]

[Illustration:  JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE.]