A friend related to him the story of a
spy of Westchester County, New York, who during the Revolution served the
American cause with rare fidelity and sagacity. Cooper was then living in
this very county, and, being attracted by the subject, he soon completed
the first volume of _The Spy_, which was at once printed. As he still
doubted, however, whether his countrymen would read "a book that treated of
their own familiar interests," he delayed writing the second volume for
several months. When he did start to write it, his publisher feared that it
might be too long to pay, so before Cooper had thought out the intervening
chapters, he wrote the last chapter and had it printed and paged to satisfy
the publisher. When _The Spy_ was published in 1821, it immediately sold
well in America, although such was the bondage to English standards of
criticism that many who read the book hesitated to express an opinion until
they had heard the verdict from England. When the English received the
book, however, they fairly devoured it, and it became one of the most
widely read tales of the early nineteenth century. Harvey Birch, the hero
of the story, is one of the great characters of our early fiction.
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