Cooper's gift in the way of invention was not a rich endowment; but such
as it was he liked to work it, he was pleased with the effects, and
indeed he did some quite sweet things with it. In his little box of
stage properties he kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifices
for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with,
and he was never so happy as when he was working these innocent things
and seeing them go. A favorite one was to make a moccasined person tread
in the tracks of the moccasined enemy, and thus hide his own trail.
Cooper wore out barrels and barrels of moccasins in working that trick.
Another stage-property that he pulled out of his box pretty frequently
was his broken twig. He prized his broken twig above all the rest of his
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
Leather Stocking 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 towards a lee shore in a gale, is steered for a
particular 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? For
several years Cooper was daily in the society of artillery, and he ought