But I could not, somehow, listen to him: the whole scene, the whole deep
event, had taken hold upon me strangely. It was so full of human
meaning, human emotion, human pathos. I drifted away from the crowd and
stepped in at the open door of the old house, and walked through the
empty, resounding rooms with their curious old wallpaper and low
ceilings and dusty windows. And there were the old fireplaces where the
heavy brick had been eaten away by the pokings and scrapings of a
century; and the thresholds worn by the passage of many feet, the
romping feet of children, the happy feet of youth the bride passed here
on her wedding night with her arm linked in the arm of the groom; the
sturdy, determined feet of maturity; the stumbling feet of old age
creeping in; the slow, pushing feet of the bearers with the last burden,
crowding out--

The air of the house had a musty, shut-in odour, ironically cut through,
as all old things are, by the stinging odour of the new: the boiling of
the auction coffee in the half-dismantled kitchen, the epochal moment in
the life of Julia Templeton. I could hear, occasionally, her high,
strident worried voice ordering a helper about. Such a hard-favoured
woman!

It is the studied and profitable psychology of the auction that the
rubbish must be sold first--pots and bottles and jugs at five-cent bids,
and hoes at ten--and after that, the friction of the contest having
warmed in the bidders an amiable desire to purchase goods they do not
want and cannot use, the auctioneer gradually puts forth the treasures
of the day.

As I came out of the old house I could see that the mystic web had been
spun, that the great moment of the sale was arriving. The auctioneer was