This is one of the most charming of the little lakes that dot the interior of New York; without bold shores or anything sensational in its scenery, it is a poetic element in a refined and lovely landscape.  There are a few fishing-lodges and summer cottages on its banks (one of them distinguished as “Sinners’ Rest"), and a hotel or two famous for dinners; but the traveler would be repaid if there were nothing except the lovely village of Cooperstown embowered in maples at the foot.  The town rises gently from the lake, and is very picturesque with its church spires and trees and handsome mansions; and nothing could be prettier than the foreground, the gardens, the allees of willows, the long boat wharves with hundreds of rowboats and sail-boats, and the exit of the Susquehanna River, which here swirls away under drooping foliage, and begins its long journey to the sea.  The whole village has an air of leisure and refinement.  For our tourists the place was pervaded by the spirit of the necromancer who has woven about it a spell of romance; but to the ordinary inhabitants the long residence of the novelist here was not half so important as that of the very distinguished citizen who had made a great fortune out of some patent, built here a fine house, and adorned his native town.  It is not so very many years since Cooper died, and yet the boatmen and loungers about the lake had only the faintest impression of the man-there was a writer by that name, one of them said, and some of his family lived near the house of the great man already referred to.  The magician who created Cooperstown sleeps in the old English-looking church-yard of the Episcopal church, in the midst of the graves of his relations, and there is a well-worn path to his head-stone.  Whatever the common people of the town may think, it is that grave that draws most pilgrims to the village.  Where the hillside cemetery now is, on the bank of the lake, was his farm, which he visited always once and sometimes twice a day.  He commonly wrote only from ten to twelve in the morning, giving the rest of the time to his farm and the society of his family.  During the period of his libel suits, when the newspapers represented him as morose and sullen in his retirement, he was, on the contrary, in the highest spirits and the most genial mood.  “Deer-slayer” was written while this contest was at its height.  Driving one day from his farm with his daughter, he stopped and looked long over his favorite prospect on the lake, and said, “I must write one more story, dear, about our little lake.”  At that moment the “Deerslayer” was born.  He was silent the rest of the way home, and went immediately to his library and began the story.