[ CHAPTER VII—Three Announcements ]
[ CHAPTER VIII—Leveling Down ]
BOOK I—BEGINNINGS
PROLOGUE—The Young Man at the Stern
A THICK, wet night on the southwest coast of Lake Michigan a dozen years ago; a wind that sweeps over the pitching lake and on over the dim white beach with a rush that whirls the sand up and away. Trees are bending up there on the bluff. The sand and the rain are in the air—or do we feel the spray from yonder line of breakers, a hundred yards away?
And deep in a mudhole on the lonely road that skirts the bluff—the four horses, fetlock-deep in the sticky clay, straining forward like heroes, the members of the student crew in their oilskins throwing their weight on the wheels of the truck—is the Evanston surf-boat.