Page:I, Mary MacLane (1917).pdf/195

 To-morrow

LL my life I've liked the Back of a magazine.

Some black-browed Wednesday I purchase a magazine, a fifteen-cent one, and read it through. I read the stories and they deeply engage or lightly interest me. I read the 'special articles' and if they tell about flying machines or wild birds or hospitals or woman-prisoners in penitentiaries they charm or absorb my thoughts. I look at the illustrations and try to decide whether they are art or science or mechanism. I read the verse and if it's poetry it exhilarates me as if closed shutters were opened to let Day into a gloomy Room.

Then I read the advertisements in the Back and they do all of those things to me in comforting life-giving oxygen-furnishing ways. Each advertisement is a short story with an eerie little 'plot' in it: each is a special article full of purpose: each is fruitful poetry: and in my two hands I all-but have and hold those wonderful Things they exploit.

They make me feel it's my birthday and I'm presented a wealth of lavish gifts.

They make me feel it's all a world of playthings.

They make me feel like a baby with a rattle, a ball and a hoop of bells.

I like everything in the Back of a magazine.