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are sitting in your wide, open, shaded, tranquil cockpit, parading like an electric canoe past forty miles of Macy’s windows. The gentry in those parts have an unadvertised convention of celebrating the spirit of Christmas with competitively ingenious lighting on their lawns, porches, chimneys. A million colored lights, in ten thousand configurations. It is enough to make children, and non-children, wild with delight. And then (my
Cyrano
brochures advertised) when the gamy generations came to visit, sons and grandchildren on vacation, the boat was ready to go. Go where? Well, actually, go anywhere. Certainly fifty miles across the Gulf Stream to Bimini, or to the enchanting Cat Cay. And east from there, a day and one half to Nassau, and down the Exuma chain; then back again, returning the vessel to the old folks, until they migrated in April, or whenever, back to Long Island, or Lake Forest, returning the boat to the owner.
    Nobody, but nobody at all, elected to hire himself these delights; so my wife and I and friends did, a half dozen times during the ensuing two seasons. But then the day came when our treasurer, Mrs. Flynn, asked me for—yet more money. There was nothing coming in, she reminded me. By chance I had just finished commissioning a major overhaul, directed primarily at getting
Cyrano’s
eccentric electrical system into absolutely reliable order, and endowing her with cold plates that permit you, after only one or two hours’ service of the generator, to keep things ice cold all day long. Supervising the operation was a young man of great experience who had served as a professional boat captain. It was while he had the boat in Savannah, where the work was being done under his supervision, that I made the decision that has been made by thousands of grown-up men, backed into stoicism. The only way to go was fast, and so I called a broker. In two weeks he had a likely buyer, a gentleman from El Paso, Texas, and San Diego, California.
    Since it is one of my purposes in this book to share practical as well as idiosyncratic experiences, permit me the suggestion that when you sell your boat, if you are especially attached to it, you make it a rule to establish no social contact
whatever
with the buyer. In this case the buyer was instantly recognizable as the self-made man—because he so proclaimed himself. You ask for X. The broker says that he has a buyer who is extremely interested, but is willing to pay only X minus Y. You think a while, measure pride and obstinacy against prudence and convenience and, depending on the mood, tilt one way or the other. On this occasion I was taken up with so many preoccupations extrinsic to sailing or haggling that I said, Okay, I’ll go with X minus Y; but remember, I get to keep the radiotelephone (value $5 ,000) .
    A few days later the purchaser is on the spot at the boatyard in Savannah, his surveyor poking his ice pick into my
Cyrano’s
bottom to confirm what I had always known, that no sounder ship had ever been crafted, and the broker advises me over the telephone to Connecticut that the purchaser insists on talking to me. Against my better judgment I take the phone. He is the preternatural bargainer, who cannot sleep at night unless, during the day, he has shaken someone’s resolution to his own commercial advantage. He
had
to have the radio, he argued, affecting bonhomie, and adducing coy reasons why the radio was of little use to me without a boat to put it in. I told him I retained a perfectly satisfactory yawl. The broker came back on the telephone. I came close to calling the whole thing off, but decided instead to do a little bargaining of my own, so I fired my aesthetic Big Bertha. You see, the saloon of
Cyrano
was lit by a soft shower of multicolored lights that refracted off three original oil paintings by Richard Grosvenor, from whose fingertips the roiling seas come as water from a faucet. The effect of the lighting was spectacular and moved a thousand