Excerpt from The Isle of Palms: Adventures While Wrecking for Gold, Encounter With a Mad Whale, Battle With a Devil-Fish, Fish, and Capture of a Mermaid The sleeping town lay hushed in a silence that would have been oppressive but for the ever-chang ing monotony of the surf, breaking on the great barrier-reef, together with the indistinct murmur among the long fronds of the palms, and the distant clang of the waterfalls, heard far up the Nuuanu. 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.