thirty.... Speak up now, Ike, we know you've come here to-day to make
your fortune--do I hear thirty?"

No sooner had the great bed been sold ("it's yours, Mrs. Craigie, a
treasure and dirt cheap") there came an ancient pair of hand-wrought
andirons, and a spider-legged table, and a brass warming-pan, and a
banjo clock....

I scarcely know how to explain it, but the sale of these inanimate
antiques, so charged with the restrained grace, the reticent beauty, the
serviceable strength, of a passing age, took hold upon me with strange
intensity. In times of high emotion the veil between sight and insight
slips aside and that which lies about us suddenly achieves a higher
reality. We are conscious of

"Something beside the form
Something beyond the sound."

It came to me with a thrill that this was no mere sale of antique wood
and brass and iron, but a veritable auction, here symbolized, of the
decaying fragments of a sternly beautiful civilization.

I looked off across the stony fields, now softly green in the sunlight,
from which three generations of the Templeton family had wrung an heroic
living; I looked up at the majestic old house where they had lived and
married and died....

As my eye came back to the busy scene beneath the chestnut tree it
seemed to me, how vividly I cannot describe--that beside or behind the
energetic and perspiring Mr. Harpworth there stood Another Auctioneer.