Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/78

 MARK TWAIN

effects, and worked it the hardest. It is a restful chapter in any book of his when somebody doesn t step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds and whites for two hundred yards around. Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig. There may be a hundred handier things to step on, but that wouldn t satisfy Cooper. Cooper requires him to turn out and find a dry twig; and if he can t do it, go and borrow one. In fact, the Leatherstocking Series ought to have been called the Broken Twig Series.

I am sorry there is not room to put in a few dozen instances of the delicate art of the forest, as practised by Natty Bumppo and some of the other Cooperian experts. Perhaps we may venture two or three samples. [[Cooper was a sailor a naval officer; yet he gravely tells us how a vessel, driving toward a lee shore in a gale, is steered for a par ticular spot by her skipper because he knows of an undertow there which will hold her back against the gale and save her. For just pure woodcraft, or sailorcraft, or whatever it is, isn t that neat ^J For several years Cooper was daily in the society of artillery, and he ought to have noticed that when a cannon-ball strikes the ground it either buries itself or skips a hundred feet or so; skips again a hundred feet or so and so on, till finally it gets tired and rolls. Now in one place he loses some &quot;females&quot; as he always calls women in the edge of a wood near a plain at night in a fog, on purpose to give Bumppo a chance to show off the delicate art

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