After paying one or two visits, I
was hobbling up Broadway, to go to the Globe again, when my old commander
at Pensacola, Commodore Bolton, passed down street, arm-in-arm with a
stranger. I saluted the commodore, who nodded his head to me, and this
induced the stranger to look round. Presently I heard "Ned!" in a voice
that I knew immediately, though I had not heard it in thirty-seven years.
It was my old shipmate--the gentleman who has written out this account of
my career, from my verbal narrative of the facts.
Mr. Cooper asked me to go up to his place, in the country, and pass a few
weeks there. I cheerfully consented, and we reached Cooperstown early in
June. Here I found a neat village, a beautiful lake, nine miles long, and,
altogether, a beautiful country. I had never been as far from the sea
before, the time when I served on Lake Ontario excepted. Cooperstown lies
in a valley, but Mr. Cooper tells me it is at an elevation of twelve
hundred feet above tide-water. To me, the clouds appeared so low, I
thought I could almost shake hands with them; and, altogether, the air and
country were different from any I had ever seen, or breathed, before.
My old shipmate took me often on the Lake, which I will say is a slippery
place to navigate. I thought I had seen all sorts of winds before I saw
the Otsego, but, on this lake it sometimes blew two or three different
ways at the same time.
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