who struggle within himself. The animating passion even of little Mr. Wrenn—his quest for romance in love and travel—Mr. Lewis doubtless found duplicated in his own heart; but in the case of Mr. Wrenn, he diluted the passion and gently caricatured its embodiment. In The Trail of the Hawk he treats the same quest but he treats it seriously, and he endows his hero with an important additional passion—the desire for distinction, the love of glory. Carl Ericson of Joralemon, Minnesota, a second-generation Norwegian, is described as "heir-apparent of the age," the typical American of his period: "It was for him to carry on the American destiny of extending the Western horizon; his to restore the wintry Pilgrim virtues and the exuberant, October, partridge-drumming days of Daniel Boone; then to add, in his own or another generation, new American aspirations for beauty."
There is our theme: the emergence of a typical American from our midwestern frontier, in the generation who were small boys in 1890. The stages are interesting. First, there is a healthy athletic boyhood in an American small town, where a spark is dropped by a village radical who has read Robert Ingersoll, Karl Marx, and Napoleon—a preliminary sketch of Bjornstam in Main Street. "Life," says this rural philosopher to the boy, "is just a little old checker game played by the alfalfa contingent at the country store unless you've got an ambition that's too big to ever quite lasso it. You want to know that there is something ahead that's bigger
