High Adventure. But this enterprising young man is notably hard-headed, a hard worker, with a good workman's prejudice in favor of keeping himself and his tools in order. Mr. Lewis's beauty is always tonic—never relaxing. I remember hearing him say, with a grimace, that he liked best in Main Street the purple patches over which he had sweat blood, but that no one else noticed them. His use of landscape is rigorously economical, but there are paragraphs, even in this earlier book, done with a touch that recalls Tolstoy and Turgenev in their great hunting scenes. Here is a whiff of the hero's boyhood in Minnesota:
He loitered outside the shed, sniffing at the smoke from burning leaves—the scent of autumn and migration and wanderlust. He glanced down between houses to the reedy shore of Joralemon Lake. The surface of the water was smooth, and tinted like a blue bell, save for one patch in the current where wavelets leaped with October madness in sparkles of diamond fire. Across the lake, woods sprinkled with gold-dust and paprika broke the sweep of sparse yellow stubble, and a red barn was softly brilliant in the caressing sunlight and lively air of the Minnesota prairie. Over there was the field of valor, where grown-up men with shiny shotguns went hunting prairie chickens; the Great World, leading clear to the Red River Valley and Canada.
Three mallard ducks, with necks far out and wings beating hurriedly, shot over Carol's head. From far off a gun-shot floated echoing through forest hollows; in the waiting stillness sounded a rooster's crow, distant, magical.
