Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/81

 COOPER S LITERARY OFFENSES

&quot;the narrowest part of the stream.&quot; This shrinkage is not accounted for. The stream has bends in it, a sure indication that it has alluvial banks and cuts y them; yet these bends are only thirty and fifty feet long. If Cooper had been a nice and punctilious ob server he would have noticed that the bends were oftener nine hundred feet long than short of it.

Cooper made the exit of that stream fifty feet wide, in the first place, for no particular reason; in the second place, he narrowed it to less than twenty to accommodate some Indians. He bends a sap ling&quot; to the form of an arch over this narrow passage, and conceals six Indians in its foliage. They are &quot;laying&quot; for a settler s scow or ark which is coming up the stream on its way to the lake; it is being hauled against the stiff current by a rope whose stationary end is anchored in the lake; its rate of progress cannot be more than a mile an hour. Cooper describes the ark, but pretty obscurely. In the matter of dimensions &quot;it was little more than a modern canal -boat.&quot; Let us guess, then, that it was about one hundred and forty feet long. It was of &quot;greater breadth than common.&quot; 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 mir acle. A low-roofed log dwelling occupies &quot;two- thirds of the ark s length&quot; a dwelling ninety feet long and sixteen feet wide, let us say a kind of vestibule train. The dwelling has two rooms each

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