The scout of the Leatherstocking tales, past forty, guides a sergeant's daughter to a garrison on Lake Ontario and finds he wants to marry her. Cooper had served in the navy on those lakes and knew what a gale does to a schooner with a lee shore. He made his hero, for once, a man who can be refused. Thirty-one plates of rivers, forests and moonlight, from Kensett's Hudson River Scene to a wooded river landscape of 1670, carry the inland waters and wild shore through the text.
