Excerpt from The Upstart The old fisherman and the small boy walked a couple of hundred feet down the curving river bank to a knoll, where, safe above high water, stood a curious structure of driftwood and refuse lumber. Its roof was little higher than a man's head, but it stretched back for forty feet, like a section of a tunnel. In front of it was a little platform, supported on piles over the oily stream, to reach which it was necessary to descend the bank and then climb a ladder of six steps. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This 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.