This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

and more beautiful than anything you've ever seen." Next comes a course in Plato College, a course terminated abruptly by the boy's open championship of an instructor from Yale who has ruined his usefulness to the institution by discussing the works of H. G. Wells and G. B. Shaw and by admitting the existence of the theory of evolution. There follows a period of miscellaneous adventure as chauffeur, traveling actor, porter on the Bowery, mechanic in the Canal Zone and Mexico, then an apprenticeship in a school of aviation in California, flying for country fairs, a series of prize flights followed by intoxicating ovations, the development of the Touricar company, a love affair on the Palisades and in the Berkshires, respectability and entrance upon contemporary "civilization," such as it is, including modern plumbing, individual bed-rooms, candles on the dinner table, Sunday morning breakfasts with a choice of conversation or auction-bridge; and the reading of Tono-Bungay, David Copperfield, Jude the Obscure, The Damnation of Theron Ware, Madame Bovary, McTeague, Walden, War and Peace, Turgenev, Balzac and William James. In a free poetic fashion, I assume that this narrative sketches Mr. Lewis's own flight from Sauk Centre, Minnesota, by way of Yale College, New York and San Francisco journalism, and the short story magazine, into literature.

The Trail of the Hawk is a book with extravagant variety of scenes and atmospheres, the first two-thirds of it written with much gusto. It is