"You save your money, young lady," Stanley warned.
Personally Gus wished he had a bulldog so that he might buy dog collar 6R6268, ablaze with brass and imitation topaz. Then with a college-shaped meerschaum pipe, a cane, a green suit and yellow gloves he would go calling upon the new school teacher. If that didn't impress her he didn't know what would.
When no one else was around he hastily turned to the section displaying corsets and women's underwear. He had never seen anything like it. Montgomery Ward's didn't have half as many big, blooming girls in lace-trimmed drawers, union suits, princess slips, corsets, and corset covers. He had never seen so many stylish stouts with blossoming cheeks and magnificent buttocks. The moment he dared he would carefully cut out whole pages of those colorful girls, particularly the smiling matron whose union suit was described as "snug fitting with flaring umbrella bottom."
"Gee," said Gus, "I'd like to have one of everything in this catalogue."
Life could be lived in those days, as it can now, without stepping off the farm for so much as a length of ribbon. You could "laugh yourself to death" for fourteen cents by perusing "On a Slow Train Through Arkansas," "Through New Hampshire on a Buckboard," or "I'm From Texas, You Can't Steer Me." You could buy—and still can—hay forks, Wilton carpets adorned with large red roses, slide trombones, butter paddles, post card albums, cylinder records, or magic lanterns for a relatively trifling sum.
And never before in the history of civilization was seen such a display of hammocks, guns, cuckoo clocks, home remedies, feather dusters, folding tubs, bust forms, pacifiers, bed pans, trusses, windmills, lard presses, hornless talking machines and morris chairs. Ben Hur's famous chariot race enlivened a full page in color, while the devout could purchase the Bible for as little as sixty-three cents.
They did not care if the storm was raging outside. They did not care that they were snowbound. They were living in the romantic world of the mail order catalogue where they were all as rich as kings, where every woman wore a beautiful new dress and every man was handsome and stylish, where there were bonbons and books and beautiful buggies.
"Well, now that we've got the new catalogue, we know where we can put the old one," said Gus, winking at Stud.
Sarah blushed and Early Ann giggled.