“We’ll go on another cruise next summer, sure,” said Harry. “Where shall we go?”
Tom was the first to reply. Said he, “I’ve been thinking that we can do better than we did this time.”
“How so?” asked the other boys.
“The Whitewing is an awfully nice boat,” Tom continued, “but she is too small. We ought to have a boat that we can sleep in comfortably, and without getting wet every night.”
“But, then,” Harry suggested, “you couldn’t drag a bigger boat round a dam.”
“We can’t drag the Whitewing round much of a dam. She’s too big to be handled on land, and too little to be comfortable. Now, here’s my plan.”
“Let’s have it,” cried the other boys.
“We can hire a cat-boat about twenty feet long, and she’ll be big enough, so that we can rig up a canvas cabin at night. We can anchor her, and sleep on board her every night. We can carry mattresses, so we needn’t sleep on stones and stumps—”
—“And coffee-pots,” interrupted Joe.
—“And we can take lots of things, and live comfortably. We can sail instead of rowing; and though I like to row as well as the next fellow, we’ve had a little too much of that. Now we’ll get a cat-boat next summer, and we’ll cruise from New York Bay to Montauk Point. We can go all the way through the bays on the south side, and there are only three places where we will have to get a team of horses to drag the boat across a little bit of flat meadow. I know all about it, for I studied it out on the map one day. What do you say for that for a cruise?”