No one, so far as I know, ever heard him complain, or bemoan his age, or regret the change in the times; and when his day came, he lay down upon his bed and died.

“Positively nothing will be reserved,” were the familiar words of the poster, and they have a larger meaning in an old country neighbourhood than the mere sale of the last pan and jug and pig and highboy.  Though we live with our neighbours for fifty years we still secretly wonder about them.  We still suspect that something remains covered, something kept in and hidden away, some bits of beauty unappreciated—­as they are, indeed, with ourselves.  But death snatches away the last friendly garment of concealment; and after the funeral the auction.  We may enter now.  The doors stand at last flung widely open; all the attics have been ransacked; all the chests have been turned out; a thousand privacies stand glaringly revealed in the sunny open spaces of the yard.  Positively nothing will be reserved; everything will be knocked down to the highest bidder.  What wonder that the neighbourhood gathers, what wonder that it nods its head, leaves sentences half uttered, smiles enigmatically.

Nearly all the contents of the house had been removed to the yard, under the great chesnut tree.  A crowd of people, mostly women, were moving about among the old furniture, the old furniture that had been in John 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——­”