Suddenly rousing himself one of these autumn afternoons, he called for pen and paper, but too ill to use them, asked Mrs. Cooper, watching anxiously by his side, to write for him.  Fearing delirium, she wrote, thinking it would relieve him.  A page of notes was rapidly dictated, which seemed to his alarmed nurse but the wild fancies of a fevered brain.  It proved to be a clear account of a lively struggle between “Magua” and “Chingachgook,” and made the twelfth chapter of the book.  Why the author called Lake George by another name is thus explained:  “Looking over an ancient map, he found that a tribe of Indians the French called Les Honcans lived by this beautiful sheet of water, and thinking the English name too commonplace and the Indian name too hard to pronounce, he chose the ‘Horican’ as better suiting simple Natty.”  This book, “The Last of the Mohicans,” proved, perhaps, to be the most popular of all his works up to 1826.

[Illustration:  GLENS FALL.]

[Illustration:  LAKE GEORGE, OR “THE HORICAN.”]

A present-day man-of-letters writes of Cooper:  “He paints Indians and Indian scenes with a glow of our sunset skies and the crimson of our autumn maples, and makes them alive with brilliant color.  Rifles crack, tomahawks gleam, and arrows dart like sunbeams through the air.  Indians fleet of foot and full of graceful movement are these dusky Apollo’s Uncas.  Cooper’s readers never yawn over these tales of the forest or the sea.  He is the swan on the lake, the eagle in the air, the deer in the wood, and the wind on the sea.”  So writes Prof.  Brander Matthews.  That life-student of the American Indian, Francis Parkman, wrote:  “It is easy to find fault with ‘The Last of the Mohicans,’ but it is far from easy to rival or even approach its excellence.”  It is said that “Magua,” of this book, “is the best-drawn Indian in fiction; from scalp-lock to moccasin tingling with life” and the tension of the canoe-chase on the Horican.

During this Lake George excursion a question came up between the Hon. Mr. Stanley, the Hon. Wortley Montagu, and Mr. Cooper as to who was the “Premier Baron of England.”  Cooper named Lord Henry William Fitzgerald (3rd son of James, 1st Duke of Leinster) 22nd Baron de Ros [b. 1761—­d. 1829] as his man; whose title came from Henry I., to Peter, Lord of Holderness called Ros.  Each of his two friends claimed another as the “Premier Baron of England.”  All were so confident that a wager was laid, and later inquiry proved Cooper right.  In due time the debt was paid with a large gold, silver-filled seal.  On its stone—­a chrysoprase—­appeared a baron’s coronet and the old Scottish proverb:  “He that will to Cupar maun to Cupar!” The incident serves to affirm Cooper’s wide information and accurate memory.

[Illustration:  THE WAGER SEAL.]

This winter of 1825-26 Cooper and his family made their home at 345 Greenwich Street, not many steps from 92 Hudson Street, where lived the poet William Cullen Bryant, who often went around the corner for a walk with his friend.