Templeton's family for no one knows how long--old highboys and lowboys,
a beautifully simple old table or so, and beds with carved posts, and
hand-wrought brasses, and an odd tall clock that struck with sonorous
dignity. These things, which had been temptingly advertised as
"antiques," a word John Templeton never knew, were only the common
serviceable things of uncounted years of family life.

Nothing about the place was of any great value except the antiques, and
it was these that drew the well-dressed women in automobiles from as far
away as Hempfield and Nortontown; and yet there were men in plenty to
poke the pigs, look sarcastically at the teeth of the two old horses,
and examine with calculating and rather jeering eyes John Templeton's
ancient buggy, and the harness and the worn plough and cultivator and
mowing machine. Everything seems so cheap, so poor, so unprotected,
when the spirit has departed.

Under the chestnut tree the swarthy auctioneer with his amiable
countenance and ironical smile acquired through years of dispassionate
observation of the follies of human emotion, the mutability of human
affairs, the brevity of human endeavour, that brought everything at last
under his hammer--there by the chestnut tree the auctioneer had taken
his stand in temporary eminence upon an old chest, with an ancient
kitchen cupboard near him which served at once as a pulpit for
exhortation, and a block for execution. Already the well-worn smile had
come pat to his countenance, and the well-worn witticisms were ready to
his tongue.

"Now, gentlemen, if you'll give me such attention as you can spare from
the ladies, we have here to-day----"