[Illustration:  BRYANT.]

General Wilson wrote:  “Soon after Bryant went to New York he met Cooper, who, a few days later, said:  ’Come and dine with me tomorrow; I live at No. 345 Greenwich Street.’  ‘Please put that down for me,’ said Bryant, ‘or I shall forget the place.’  ‘Can’t you remember three-four-five?’ replied Cooper bluntly.  Bryant did remember ‘three-four-five,’ not only for that day, but ever afterward.”

During this spring Cooper followed a deputation of Pawnee and Sioux Indians from New York to Washington, in order to make a close study of them for future use.  He was much interested in the chiefs’ stories of their wild powers, dignity, endurance, grace, cunning wiles, and fierce passions.  The great buffalo hunts across the prairies he had never seen; the fights of mounted tribes and the sweeping fires over those boundless plains all claimed his eager interest and sympathy, with the resulting desire to place “these mounted tribes” and their desert plains beyond the Mississippi in another Indian story.  One of the chiefs of this party—­a very fine specimen of a warrior, a remarkable man in every way—­is credited with being the original of “Hard-Heart” of “The Prairie,” which an authority gives as Cooper’s favorite book.  On a knoll, and within the glory of a western sunset, stood Natty, born of the author’s mind and heart, as he first appeared in this book.  “The aged trapper—­a nobly pathetic figure contrasted with the squatter”—­looms up, colossal, against the gleaming radiance of departing day; and full well he knows his own leaving for the long-home is not far off—­for the remarkable life of wondrous Leatherstocking closes within these pages.  Of other characters and the author Prof.  Matthews says:  “He was above all things a creator of character.—­He can draw women.—­The wife of Ishmael Bush, the squatter, mother of seven stalwart sons and sister of a murderous rascal, is an unforgotten portrait, solidly painted by a master.”  “The Prairie” was begun in the winter of 1826, in the New York, Greenwich-Street home, while Cooper was under the weather from the old fever effects.  The closing of his father’s estate, and debts contracted against him by those whom he had helped, emptied his purse and left him a poor man.  To meet these calls of honor and his own needs, he wrote when not able to do so, and for a short and only time in his life called in the aid of coffee for his work.  Wine he drank daily at dinner only, and he never smoked.

[Illustration:  “NATTY, THE TRAPPER.”]

[Illustration:  HENRY CLAY.]

[Illustration:  CHANCELLOR KENT.]

When Cooper followed the Sioux and Pawnee Indians to Washington, in 1826, Henry Clay, Secretary of State, offered him the appointment of United States Minister to Sweden.  It was declined in favor of the consulship to Lyons, France, which latter would allow him more freedom and protect his family in case of foreign troubles.  With this trip to Europe in view his family busily studied French and Spanish.  Returning to New York, Cooper’s club gave him a farewell dinner, at which the author said he intended to write a history of the United States Navy.  At this dinner he was toasted by Chancellor Kent as “the genius which has rendered our native soil classic ground, and given to our early history the enchantment of fiction.”