Nantucket is southeast of Martha's Vineyard and south of Cape Cod, the sea between them being known as Nantucket Sound. The island is an irregular spherical triangle, sixteen miles long and three to four miles wide, the outer coast bent around like a bow, as the Gulf Stream currents wash the shores. To the south and east are the great Nantucket Shoals, dangerous to the navigator, but acting as a breakwater, preventing the island being entirely washed away by the sea, which makes constant encroachments. The harbor of Nantucket town presents sandy beaches and bluff shores, rising with some boldness from the water, the sand dunes stretching away in regular lines behind them. The town is snugly located at the bottom of a deep and secure harbor, having a breakwater outside, and its chief daily event is the arrival of the steamboat from the mainland, from which it is frequently cut off for days together by winter ice and stormy weather. There are various ancient and dilapidated wharves, fronting a collection of strange-looking old gabled houses, many having raised platforms on top of the peaked roofs, where the former inhabitants used to go up to watch for vessels. It is a healthy place, with modern hotels, tree-lined, pleasant streets, many gardens, and a magnificent climate, the winter rigors corrected by the closeness of the Gulf Stream. The surrounding country, outside the town, is almost everywhere a flat prairie-land, with the one horizon all around, of the distant blue sea. A narrow-gauge railroad leads over to the southeastern coast at Siasconset, the quaint original gem of the island, familiarly called 'Sconset, a curious little village of fishermen's huts, existing now about the same as in the primitive days. Its outlook is over the South Shoals, but not a sail is to be seen, for these shoals are the grave of every vessel getting upon them. It is a dismal reminder of vanished maritime prestige to see about the Nantucket coasts the gaunt ribs of the old hulks, half sunken in the sands where they have been cast ashore, as year by year they gradually break up in the great storms and slowly disappear. In the Boston _Daily Advertiser_ a poet plaintively mourns the fate of these marine skeletons seen "at midnight off the coast": "Half-tombed in drifting sands upon the shore Are ye, and heedless lashed by angry seas, As through your blackened ribs the breeze Exultant plays, and crested breakers roar, And screeching sea-gulls round thee, prostrate, soar. Wert thou allured by sighs of moaning trees, As sirens sought to charm with songs like these Ulysses and his brave companions o'er To reefs deep hidden, silent, save in storm? The rolling thunder of the sullen surge, The mournful sobbing of the gathering gale, Plain answer make, as round the spectre form Of these gaunt skeletons they ceaseless scourge The giant's battered coat of oaken mail!"