In those days I had an old wooden Stone Horse, Little Slipper. I loved her and thought she was a remarkable boat.  I was living on Bassett Island at the time, which gave me a good view of the transient floating population.  I marveled daily that people bought the boats
they did.  The little fiberglass racer-cruisers of Stone Horse size were such awkward and treacherous sailors that their owners didn't dare to sail them in and out of the harbor.  There was a boom in motors and gasoline.  It made me sad to see the trend towards ugliness
and incompetence.  My Stone Horse was as obedient and clever as I could want.  But she had been designed more than thirty years earlier.  Was this progress?
      Breck Marshall had recently begun building his little eighteen-foot catboats, and seemed to have found a small niche in the fiberglass boat market.  I suggested to him that he build Stone Horses, or something similar.  It seemed to me he couldn't lose with a small cruising sloop so outrageously superior to the competition.  He agreed that the Stone Horse was an excellent design, but thought me naive for supposing people would buy something merely because it
was better.  He attributed his own survival to the uniqueness of catboats.  He said that any fool could recognize a catboat, but that most people wouldn't know a Stone Horse from any of the dozens of twenty-three-foot fiberglass sloops in the glossy magazine ads.