Arrowsmith

NOVELS BY SINCLAIR LEWIS

OUR MR. WRENN

THE TRAIL OF THE HAWK

THE JOB

FREE AIR

MAIN STREET

BABBITT

ARROWSMITH

ARROWSMITH

SINCLAIR LEWIS

_Author of_ Main Street, Babbitt, _etc._

TORONTO

GEORGE J. McLEOD, LIMITED

PUBLISHERS

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.

The Designer Publishing Company, Inc.

_The first edition of_ ARROWSMITH _consists of 500 copies on handmade

paper, numbered and signed by the author_.

Second printing [first trade edition], January, 1925

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY

THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY

RAHWAY, N. J.

_To Dr. Paul H. DeKruif I am indebted not only for most of the

bacteriological and medical material in this tale but equally for

his help in the planning of the fable itself--for his realization

of the characters as living people, for his philosophy as a

scientist. With this acknowledgment I want to record our months of

companionship while working on the book, in the United States, in

the West Indies, in Panama, in London and Fontainebleau. I wish I

could reproduce our talks along the way, and the laboratory

afternoons, the restaurants at night, and the deck at dawn as we

steamed into tropic ports._

SINCLAIR LEWIS

ARROWSMITH

CHAPTER I

The driver of the wagon swaying through forest and swamp of the Ohio

wilderness was a ragged girl of fourteen. Her mother they had buried

near the Monongahela--the girl herself had heaped with torn sods the

grave beside the river of the beautiful name. Her father lay shrinking

with fever on the floor of the wagon-box, and about him played her

brothers and sisters, dirty brats, tattered brats, hilarious brats.

She halted at the fork in the grassy road, and the sick man quavered,

“Emmy, ye better turn down towards Cincinnati. If we could find your

Uncle Ed, I guess he’d take us in.”

“Nobody ain’t going to take us in,” she said. “We’re going on jus’ long

as we can. Going West! They’s a whole lot of new things I aim to be

seeing!”

She cooked the supper, she put the children to bed, and sat by the fire,

alone.

That was the great-grandmother of Martin Arrowsmith.