allusion to him.”  Their next venture was Hotel de Jumieges in a small garden, far from the Faubourg St. Germain, where they had an apartment of six rooms.  Cooper wrote:  “The two lower floors were occupied as a girls’ boarding-school;—­the reason for dwelling in it, our own daughters were in the school; on the second floor there was nothing but our own apartment.”  And here, next door to their nun-neighbors of the convent St. Maur, Cooper wrote the last pages of “The Prairie.”  It was published in the autumn of 1826, by Lea and Carey, of Philadelphia.

[Illustration:  WHITEWALL WHARF, 1826.]

[Illustration:  KEEP OF CARISBROOK.]

[Illustration:  HAVRE, BY NIGHT.]

[Illustration:  WINDMILLS OF MONTMARTRE.]

[Illustration:  THE CONVENT ST. MAUR.]

[Illustration:  HOTEL DE JUMIEGES.]

Cooper was very fond of walking, and to get a general idea of Paris he and Captain Chauncey—­an old messmate and officer in the navy—­made the circuit of the city walls, a distance of nineteen miles, in four hours.  For two hours the captain had Cooper “a little on his quarter.”  “By this time,” Cooper wrote, “I ranged up abeam,”—­to find a pinching boot on his friend’s foot.  Near the finish the mate of this “pinching boot” became “too large,” and the captain “fell fairly astern.”  But without stopping, eating, or drinking, they made the distance in four hours to a minute.

Washington Irving wrote from Madrid the following spring:  “I left Paris before the arrival of Cooper, and regret extremely that I missed him.  I have a great desire to make his acquaintance, for I am delighted with his novels.  His naval scenes and characters in ‘The Pilot’ are admirable.”  Cooper soon became known in France by his presence at a dinner given by the U.S.  Minister to Canning then in Paris.

In “Bryant and His Friends” General James Grant Wilson says:  “Scott and Cooper met at the Princess Galitzin’s, in Paris, November, 1826; and, says Scott’s diary, ’so the Scotch and American Lions took the field together.’” In Miss Cooper’s “Pages and Pictures” appears her father’s first interview with the author of “Waverley,” of which Cooper wrote in part:  “Ten days after the arrival of Sir Walter Scott I ordered a carriage one morning.  I had got as far as the lower flight to the door when another carriage-steps rattled, and presently a large, heavy man appeared in the door of the hotel.  He was gray, limped a little, walking with a cane.  We passed on the stairs, bowing.  I was about to enter the carriage when I fancied the face and form were known to me, and it flashed on my mind that the visit might be to myself.  The stranger went up the large stone steps, with one hand on the railing and the other on his cane.  He was on the first landing as I stopped, and, turning, our eyes met.  He asked in French, ’Is it Mr. Cooper that I have the honor to see?’ ‘I am, sir.’  ‘Oh, well then, I am Walter Scott.’