then, that it was about one hundred and forty feet long.  It was of “greater breadth than common.”  Let us guess, then, that it was about sixteen feet wide.  This leviathan had been prowling down bends which were but a third as long as itself, and scraping between banks where it had only two feet of space to spare on each side.  We cannot too much admire this miracle.  A low-roofed log dwelling occupies “two-thirds of the ark’s length”—­a dwelling ninety feet long and sixteen feet wide, let us say a kind of vestibule train.  The dwelling has two rooms—­each forty-five feet long and sixteen feet wide, let us guess.  One of them is the bedroom of the Hutter girls, Judith and Hetty; the other is the parlor in the daytime, at night it is papa’s bedchamber.  The ark is arriving at the stream’s exit now, whose width has been reduced to less than twenty feet to accommodate the Indians—­say to eighteen.  There is a foot to spare on each side of the boat.  Did the Indians notice that there was going to be a tight squeeze there?  Did they notice that they could make money by climbing down out of that arched sapling and just stepping aboard when the ark scraped by?  No, other Indians would have noticed these things, but Cooper’s Indians never notice anything.  Cooper thinks they are marvelous creatures for noticing, but he was almost always in error about his Indians.  There was seldom a sane one among them.

The ark is one hundred and forty feet long; the dwelling is ninety feet long.  The idea of the Indians is to drop softly and secretly from the arched sapling to the dwelling as the ark creeps along under it at the rate of a mile an hour, and butcher the family.  It will take the ark a minute and a half to pass under.  It will take the ninety foot dwelling a minute to pass under.  Now, then, what did the six Indians do?  It would take you thirty years to guess, and even then you would have to give it up, I believe.  Therefore, I will tell you what the Indians did.  Their chief, a person of quite extraordinary intellect for a Cooper Indian, warily watched the canal-boat as it squeezed along under him, and when he had got his calculations fined down to exactly the right shade, as he judged, he let go and dropped.  And missed the house!  That is actually what he did.  He missed the house, and landed in the stern of the scow.  It was not much of a fall, yet it knocked him silly.  He lay there unconscious.  If the house had been ninety-seven feet long he would have made the trip.  The fault was Cooper’s, not his.  The error lay in the construction of the house.  Cooper was no architect.

There still remained in the roost five Indians.