A group of three friends who grew up in Illinois, listen to the stories of one of their friends, John, who lived in Salamanca for a while. He says he moved there because he thought it would be a nice place to live. He tells them about the wine he drank, the beauty of the buildings and cathedrals, and the people he met. When they were younger, the friends would all play cards while John spent time in a boat house and worked on building his own sailboat. When he finally finished it, he left and went to the Gulf of Mexico and visited the islands in the Caribbean. He returned and told his friends all about it. He then goes to Singapore and eventually returns to join the Army. He flies for the Army and then becomes a sailor and tells his friends about having to sew up eighteen dead sailors in canvas bags after they die from a disease. He had to throw them into the ocean and watch the sharks eat all of their bodies. He eventually returns to the U.S. and marries a woman who had been married to someone else, by going to her house and telling her husband that the wife is in love with him. One night he sits with his friends over drinks and talks to them about giving out a loan to a farmer, as he owns a bank now in America. They talk and have a good time and advise him not to give the loan. One friend leaves and he realizes that they were all hanging on to John and his adventures as a form of their youth and now that is all gone.