The village and the lake were ringed as far as the eye could see with fields of corn and soybeans, heavy and golden with grain waiting to be harvested. Horses, sleek and shining, ran in pastures on the gentle hillsides, and cows fed in haylots beneath giant silos that rivaled the church steeples in height and grandeur. In the center of the business district the grass in a parklike square was still green. The trees that graced it—tall, stately oaks and maples—were clothed in autumn colors, a subtle reminder that although the afternoon was reasonably warm, winter was coming to south-central Wisconsin. But he doubted that even wily Old Man Winter whistling down from Canada would catch the little town unawares. The two-and three-story brick buildings that framed the park, and the stately Victorians that lined the wide, straight streets behind them, were as solid and foursquare as the Swedish and German immigrants who had founded the place a hundred years before.
