Hook-line-and-sinker!

Novelist Katherine Ann Porter wrote a little true story of the time she helped her five-year-old niece shop for a Christmas present for her mother . . .

We wandered from shop to shop. Little Mary Alice considered seriously, in turn, a silver tea service (One Thousand Dollars); an embroidered handkerchief with lace on it (Five Dollars); a dressing-table mirror framed in porcelain flowers (Eighty-Five Dollars); a showy crystal flask of perfume (One Hundred Twenty Dollars); a gadget for curling the eyelashes (Seventy-Five Cents); a large plaque of colored glass jewels (Thirty Dollars) . . . she weakened, but only for a moment, before a mechanical monkey that did calisthenics on a cross-bar if you wound it up (One Dollar and Ninety-Eight Cents) . . . Finally, we found a present for the little girl’s mother. It turned out to be a small green pottery shell with a colored bird perched on the rim which the little girl took for an ashtray, which it…