BROADWAY HOTEL, September 19, 1850.

MY BELOVED S,—­The post office is sadly out of joint.  I wrote you the day I arrived....  Right and left I hear of “Rural Hours.”  I am stopped in the street a dozen times a day to congratulate me.  The price of the fine edition is $7.00.  It will be the presentation volume of the season.  I can see that Putnam expects to sell some eight hundred or a thousand of them....  The improvements here are wonderful.  They build chiefly of brown freestone and noble edifices of five and six stories with a good deal of architectural pretension....  I sat three times for lithographs yesterday and with vastly better success than before.  The pictures are all very like and very pleasing.  I am to have one which will fall to your lot as a matter of course.  Your letter of Tuesday reached me this morning.  You ought to have had three letters from me by Tuesday evening.  F.’s [the author’s daughter Frances] shawl went by “A.”  I suppose it is a courting shawl.  It is almost the only one of the kind Stewart had—­a little too grave perhaps but scarcely so for the country.  Stewart is making a palace of a store.  He takes the whole front of the block on Broadway with fifteen windows in front—­and all of marble.  With the tenderest regards to all, I remain yours Most affectionately, J.F.C.

[Illustration:  STEWART’S MARBLE PALACE.]

[Illustration:  MISS SUSAN AUGUSTA COOPER ABOUT 1850.]

Miss Cooper makes alive each season’s charms, as they pass over the Glimmerglass and wane beyond Hannah’s Hill.  From gentry to humble-folk, real Cooperstown types appear and disappear among these pages; and even the “half-a-dozen stores” have place, where “at the same counter you may buy kid gloves and a spade; a lace veil and a jug of molasses; a satin dress and a broom,” among other things of even greater variety.  She tells how St. Valentine’s Day was celebrated in a very original way as Vrouwen-Daghe, or women’s day of the old Dutch colonists.

[Illustration:  OTSEGO LAKE PARTY IN 1840.]

She also records that first lake party to Point Judith, given by her grandfather, Judge Cooper, in August, 1799, but leaves the description of her father’s lake parties to Mr. Keese:  “He was fond of picnic excursions on the lake, generally to the Three Mile Point, and often with a party of gentlemen to Gravelly, where the main treat was a chowder, which their host made up with great gusto.  He could also brew a bowl of punch for festive occasions, though he himself rarely indulged beyond a glass of wine for dinner.”  Concerning these festivities Mr. Keese adds:  “Lake excursions until 1840 were made by a few private boats or the heavy, flat-bottomed skiff which worthy Dick Case kept moored at the foot of Fair Street.  But Dick’s joints were too stiff to row more than an easy reach from the village; to the Fairy Spring was the usual measure of his strength.  The Three Mile Point