“What am I offered for this heirloom of the Templeton family?  Ten?  Ten!  Fifteen over there, thank you, Mr. Cody.  Why, gentlemen, that bed cannot be duplicated in America!  A real product of Colonial art!  Look at the colour of it!  Where will you find such depth of colour in any modern piece?  Age varnished it, gentlemen, age and use—­the use of a hundred years....  Twenty over there, twenty I hear, twenty, twenty, make it 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.  And I thought he had flowing locks and a patriarchal beard, and a scythe for a sign of the uncertainty of life, and a glass to mark the swiftness of its passage.  He was that Great Auctioneer who brings all things at last under his inexorable hammer.

After that, though Mr. Harpworth did his best, he claimed my attention only intermittently from that Greater Sale which was going on at his side, from that Greater Auctioneer who was conducting it with such consummate skill—­for he knew that nothing is for sale but life.  The mahogany highboy, so much packed and garnered life cut into inanimate wood; the andirons, so much life; the bookshelves upon which John Templeton kept his “Life of Napoleon Bonaparte,” so much life.  Life for sale, gentlemen!  What am I offered to-day for this bit of life—­and this—­and this—­

Mr. Harpworth had paused, for even an auctioneer, in the high moment of his art, remains human; and in the silence following the cessation of the metallic click of his voice, “Thirty, thirty, thirt, thirt—­make it thirty-five—­thank you—­forty,” one could hear the hens gossiping in the distant yard.