Book excerpt: A classic of Chesapeake Bay literature, Tom Horton's An Island Out of Time chronicles the three years Horton and his family spent on Smith Island, a marshy archipelago in the middle of Maryland's famous estuary. The result is an intimate portrait of a deeply traditional community that lived much as their ancestors did three hundred years before, attuned to the habits of blue crab, oyster, and waterfowl. In a new afterword for this edition, Horton brings the story of Smith Island, and its people, up to the present.