[Illustration:  JUDGE BAZIL HARRISON OF KALAMAZOO, MICHIGAN.]

The author placed this incident in the “Prairie Round” of “The Oak Openings.”  Its Indian Peter shows how Christian influences in time triumph over revenge—­the deadliest passion of the red-man’s heart.  On New Year’s Day, 1848, “The Oak Openings” was begun, and the following spring saw it finished.  This note appears in the author’s diary:  “Saturday, January 1, 1848.  Read St. John.  No church.  Weather very mild, though snow fell in the night.  Walking very bad, and I paid no visits outside of the family.  Had ——­ at dinner.  A merry evening with the young people.  Played chess with my wife.  Wrote a little in ’Oak Openings’ to begin the year with.”

Cooper was a born story-teller, and with a born sailor’s love of salt water could not for long keep from spinning tales of the sea.  All of which accounts for spirited and original “Jack Tier,” which came from his pen in 1848.  The story was called at first “Rose Budd”—­the name of the young creature who is one of its important characters.  But plain, homely, hard-working “Jack,” under a sailor’s garb, following her commonplace, grasping husband the world over, and finding herself in woman’s gear and grief by his side when he made his last voyage of all without her—­it is she who had earned the real heroine’s right to the name “Jack Tier.”  It is a story of the treacherous reefs off Florida and the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

All those quiet years in Cooperstown the author kept pace in mind and interest with the times, and often gave expression to his opinion on current events.  Of General Scott in Mexico he wrote, February 1, 1848:  “Has not Scott achieved marvels!  The gun-thunders in the valley of the Aztecs were heard in echoes across the Atlantic.”  Years before this the last chapter of “The Spy” paid tribute to the “bravery of Scott’s gallant brigade” in 1814, at Lundy’s Lane, not far from Niagara.  That Cooper strongly condemned Scott’s “General Order” is another record of later years.

Reform—­along all lines of service—­was Cooper’s watchword; his home-cry, first and last, was to “build up our navy!” And, with his knowledge of naval affairs and accurate estimate of seamen of all grades, what an admirable secretary of our navy these qualifications would have made him!  His political instincts seemed clear and unerring.  April 13, 1850, he thought “Congress a prodigious humbug; Calhoun’s attitude another,” as was also Webster’s answer, which, however, had “capital faults.”  From almost a seer and a prophet came in 1850 these words:  “We are on the eve of great events.  Every week knocks a link out of the chain of the Union.”  This was written to a dear and valued friend of South Carolina, to whom a few months later he further wrote:  “The Southerns talk of fighting Uncle Sam,—­that long-armed, well-knuckled, hard-fisted old scamp, Uncle Sam.”  And among the dearest of his life-long friends stood this “Southern” Commodore, William Branford Shubrick.  Yet in close quarters, “he would rather have died than lied to him.”  His standards of honesty were as rock-hewn; and his words on his friend Lawrence perhaps apply as aptly to himself:  “There was no more dodge in him than there was in the mainmast.”