Excerpt from Almayer's Folly: A Story of an Eastern RiverThe tree swung slowly round, amid the hiss and foam of the water, and soon getting free of the obstruction began to move down stream again, rolling slowly over, raising upwards a long, denuded branch, like a hand lifted in mute appeal to heaven against the river's brutal and unnecessary violence. Al mayer's interest in the fate of that tree increased rapidly. He leaned over to see if it would clear the low point below. It did, then he drew back, think ing that now its course was free down to the sea, and he envied the lot of that inanimate thing now growing small and indistinct in the deepening dark ness. As he lost sight of it altogether he began to wonder how far out to sea it would drift. Would the current carry it north or south? South, proba bly, till it drifted in sight of Celebes, as far as Macassar, perhaps!About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.