ed the
deepest canyons of the woodshed, and victoriously led his ten-penny
warriors against the sumacs in the vacant lot beyond Irving Lamb's
house.

Carl marshaled the Nail People, sticking them upright in the ground.
After reasoning sternly with an intruding sparrow, thus did the
dauntless General Door-Hinge address them:

"Men, there's a nawful big army against us, but le's die like men, my
men. Forwards!"

As the veteran finished, a devastating fire of stones enfiladed the
company, and one by one they fell, save for the commander himself, who
bowed his grizzled wrought-steel head and sobbed, "The brave boys done
their duty."

From across the lake rolled another gun-shot.

Carl dug his grimy fingers into the earth. "Jiminy! I wisht I was out
hunting. Why can't I never go? I guess I'll pile the wood, but I'm
gonna go seek-my-fortune after that."

* * * * *

Since Carl Ericson (some day to be known as "Hawk" Ericson) was the
divinely restless seeker of the romance that must--or we die!--lie
beyond the hills, you first see him in action; find him in the year
1893, aged eight, leading revolutions in the back yard. But equally,
since this is a serious study of an average young American, there
should be an indication of his soil-nourished ancestry.

Carl was second-generation Norwegian; American-born, American in
speech, American in appearance, save for his flaxen hair and
china-blue eyes; and, thanks to the flag-decked public school,
overwhelmingly American in tradition. When he was born the "typical
Americans" of earlier stocks had moved to city palaces or were
marooned on run-down farms. It was Carl Ericson, not a Trowbridge or a
Stuyvesant or a Lee or a Grant, who was 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.

They are the New Yankees, these Scandinavians of Wisconsin and
Minnesota and the Dakotas, with a human breed that can grow, and a
thousand miles to grow in. The foreign-born parents, when they first
come to the Northern Middlewest, huddle in unpainted farm-houses with
grassless dooryards and fly-zizzing kitchens and smelly dairies, set
on treeless, shadeless, unsoftened leagues of prairie or bunched in