What I like best, however, are the ingenious appeals that cast all cramping veracities to the winds. I like being invited (don’t laugh, I can show you the advertisement) to grow potatoes in a closet, or in my spare room. “Method cheap, simple, and sure.” “No digging, no hoeing” (I should think not, in my spare room!). All the potatoes I want to eat, and “immense profits” if I send them to market. No labor involved, and no annoyance, save possibly the loss of an occasional guest, as I could not well have friends sleeping in my potato-patch. I have heard of people raising mushrooms and angleworms in their cellars (I’d as soon eat one as the other); but a truck-garden in the next room would be living in the heart of nature.
And now Massachusetts, in a spasm of integrity, is trying to restrain the exuberance of the advertiser, to clip his wings, and teach him the worth of sobriety. The State proposes to abolish fraudulent advertisements, and to construe the word “fraudulent” so that it will cover any statement that can be proved to be false. A thing must really and truly be just what the advertiser says it is. But oh, Eleanor, what a tangle for the law to smooth out! If, like the three rogues in the Hindoo legend, you sell a dog for a sheep, that, of course, is a transparent lie. But if you say that Clarence Coventry’s book is an “epoch-making narrative,” who shall prove the contrary? We’d have to wait so long to find out the truth that our graves would yawn for us in the interval. And if in 1950 the student of social science were asked, “Who wrote ‘The Three Golden Apples,’ and what influence did it have upon its day?” and he should answer--very naturally--that he never had heard of it, the time for investigation would be over. Clarence, and the publishers, and “The Three Golden Apples” would all be dead together.
Your affectionate friend, _Agatha Reynolds_.
P.S. Don’t send me the book for a birthday present.
A sculptor once, in search of fame (I can’t recall the sculptor’s name), Turned Cubist, and at once began A statue on the Cubist plan.
The statue, I need hardly say, Was something in the Venus way, And as its form grew bit by bit, The sculptor fell in love with it.