and drove home.  A few days later the first pages of the new book were written.  When the touch of Time was frosting his own head, he leads Natty, as a youth, over the first warpath of his hero.  And so the “Glimmerglass” and its “Mt.  Vision” country grew into the story of “The Deerslayer”; it is “the very soul of the little lake overflowing with youthful freshness and vivid with stirring adventure.”

[Illustration:  THE GLIMMERGLASS.]

On the bosom of its waters is anchored “Muskrat Castle,” and over it, to and fro, move the “Ark of Floating Tom” and the Indian canoes, which gave a strange, wild interest to the story.  Afloat and ashore come those unlike sisters,—­proud Judith, handsome but designing, and simple-hearted Hetty, gentle, innocent, and artless; both so real and feminine, and yet so far removed from their supposed father, the buccaneer.  Then comes this Uncas of the eagle air, swooping with lithe movement to his rocky trysting-place.  And Uncas is in strong contrast with “The Pathfinder’s” “Arrowhead,” who was a wonder-sketch of the red-man’s treachery and vengeance, while his sweet girl-wife, “Dew-of-June,” shows, true to life, an Indian woman’s unfaltering devotion to her savage lord.  Over all its pages broods the commanding spirit of “The Deerslayer,”—­the forest’s young Bayard who has yet to learn what the taking of human life is like.  So, in “The Deerslayer,” printed in 1841, the “Little Lake” (Otsego), with its picturesque shores, capes, and forest-crowned heights, was made classic soil.  Just back of “The Five-Mile Point.”—­where Deerslayer gave himself up to merciless Indian justice at the Huron Camp, and later was rescued by British regulars—­is the rocky gorge, Mohican Glen, through which a purling brook ripples by its stone-rift banks thatched with great clumps of rose and fern.  From the gravel-strewn shore of Hutter’s Point beyond, the eyes of Leatherstocking first fell upon the Glimmerglass, and impressed by its wonder and beauty he exclaimed:  “This is grand! ’t is solemn! ’t is an edication of itself.”  Leaning on his rifle and gazing in every direction, he added:  “Not a tree disturbed, but everything left to the ordering of the Lord, to live and die, to His designs and laws!  This is a sight to warm the heart.”

[Illustration:  OTSEGO LAKE.]

The tribes, hunters, and trappers had their “own way of calling things,” and “seeing the whole basin, often fringed with pines, would throw back the hills that hung over it,” they “got to calling the place the ‘Glimmerglass.’” At Gravelly Point opposite, Deerslayer killed his first Indian, and above are the tree-tops where rose the star that timed Hist’s meeting with her lover.  Some distance to the north is the spot—­now known as the “Sunken Islands”—­which marks the site of Muskrat Castle, and is near the last resting-place of Hetty Hutter and her mother.  And far to the southwest lies a long, low, curving beach jutting sickle-shape into the lake.  As a favored haunt of muskrats, it was once called Muskrat Cove, and now Blackbird Bay.  Just beyond lies Fenimore, the home of Cooper’s early married life.