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 leaning forward now upon the tall cupboard with an air of command, and surveying the assembled crowd with a lordly eye.

“Now, Jake, careful there—­pass it along—­steady....  We come now to the cheff dooves of the day, the creem delly creems of this sale.  Gentleman and ladies, it is a great moment in the life of an auctioneer when he can offer, for sale, free and without reservation, such treasures as these....”

I could feel the warming interest of the crowd gathering in more closely about Mr. Harpworth, the furtive silences of shrewd bargainers, eagerness masked as indifference, and covetousness cloaking itself with smiling irony.  It is in the auction that trade glorifies itself finally as an Art.

“Here, gentlemen and ladies, is a genuine antique, hand-wrought and solid all the way through.  Just enough worn to give the flavour and distinction of age.  Well built in the first place, plain, simple lines, but, ladies, beautiful.”

It was the tall four-post bed he was selling and he now put his hand upon this object—­a hardy service with a cunningly simulated air of deference.  It was to be profaned by no irreverent handling!