Cooper's Novels The prairie Author:James Fenimore Cooper Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION. " I shall crave your forbearance a little; may be, I will call upon you anon, for some advantage to yourself.''—Measure for Jf'wir. Cont... more »rary to a long-established usage, a summer had been passed within the walls of a large town; but, the moment of liberation arrived, the bird does not quit its cage with greater pleasure, than that with which post-horses were commanded. We were four in a light travelling caleche, which strong Norman cattle transported merrily toward their native province. For a time we quitted Paris, the queen of modern cities, with its tumults and its order; its palaces and its lanes ; its elegance and its filth; its restless inhabitants and its stationary politicians ; its theories and its practices; its riches and its poverty; its gay and its sorrowful; its rentiers and its patriots; its young liberals and its old illiberals; its three estates and its equality; its delicacy of speech and its strength of conduct; its government of the peopleand its people of no government; its bayonets and its moral force; its science and its ignorance; its amusements and its revolutions; its resistance that goes backward, and its movement that stands still; its milliners, its philosophers, its opera-dancers, its poets, its fiddlers, its bankers, and its cooks. Although so long enthralled within the barriers, it was not easy to quit Paris entirely without regret—Paris, which every stranger censures and every stranger seeks; which moralists abhor and imitate; which causes the heads of the old to shake, and the hearts of the young to beat—Paris, the centre of so much that is excellent, and of so much that cannot be named. That night we laid our heads on rustic pillows, far from the French capital. The succeeding day we snuffed the air of the sea. Passing...« less