The Martyred Fool

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Excerpt from The Martyred Fool: A NovelThe prosperous and rising settlement of Koollala, so far as it was visible from the root of the big gum-tree on which the small boy sat, consisted of ten or a dozen houses built of weatherboard, and set on stilts, to save them from the rain which occasionally rushed down from the sur rounding heights, or the waters which occasionally tres passed from the creek below. The rudely split planks Of which these scattered tenements were built had once been white, but were now purple gray, rusty gray, green gray, from exposure to all sorts of weather. Everywhere among the scattered houses were evidences of a rough cultivation, but in all the unfenced fields great charred stems of trees stood up like monuments of ruin, and the prosperous and rising settlement looked at least as much like a graveyard as a village. The land had been cleared to the water's edge, but behind the knoll on which the small boy sat, sinking in sombre bowl after sombre bowl of foliage, lay the unbroken primeval forest. The waters of the creek ran five or six hundred feet higher than the land in their immediate neighborhood, but many a thousand years ago they had been caught in a cleft Of granite, and unable to break through that strong boundary, still held their first course toward the greater waters of the ocean.What with cold and what with hunger, what with a certain eerie sense of loneliness and a certain bitter chafing against the world at large, the small boy gritted his teeth and had to close his eyelids very tight and hard to prevent the ¿ow of tears. People are apt to think little of the sentimental woes Of children, but Evan Rhys, aetat. Seven, was as full of despair and rageagainst the world as he could well have been if he had been seven and twenty. He clenched his red fists tightly in his ragged pockets, set his teeth hard, and squeezed his eyelids as closely as they would go, and the whole declara tion of the infant soul was in favor of no surrender. As he sat thus, a boy on a pony, approached the creek from the civilized side, and after staring about him a while, sighted an old and stubborn antagonist.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.