“She’s got a million, I hear.”

“Wanter know—­merried?”

“No; just an old maid.”

“Judas Priest!  Howd she git it?”

“Writin’, I ’spoze.  She writes love stories and sich for city papers.  Some on ’em makes a lot.”

It is not always cheering to overhear too much.  When some of my friends, whom I had taken to a favorite junk shop, felt after two hours of purchase and exploration that they must not keep me waiting any longer, the man, in his eagerness to make a few more sales, exclaimed:  “Let her wait; her time ain’t wuth nothin’!”

At an auction last summer, one man told me of a very venerable lantern, an heirloom in his first wife’s family, so long, measuring nearly a yard with his hands.  I said I should like to go with him to see it, as I was making a collection of lanterns.  He looked rather dazed, and as I turned away he inquired of my friend “if I wusn’t rather—­” She never allowed him to finish, and his lantern is now mine.

People seem to have but little sentiment about their associations with furniture long in the family.

The family and a few intimate friends usually sit at the upper windows gazing curiously on the crowd, with no evidence of feeling or pathetic recollections.

I lately heard a daughter say less than a month after her father’s death, pointing to a small cretonne-covered lounge:  “Father made me that lounge with his own hands when I’s a little girl.  He tho’t a sight on’t it, and allers kep’ it ’round.  But my house is full now.  I ain’t got no room for’t.”  It sold for twelve cents!

Arthur Helps says that human nature craves, nay enjoys, tragedy; and when away from dramatic representation of crime and horrors and sudden death, as in this quiet country life, the people gratify their needs in the sorrows, sins, and calamities that befall their neighbors.

I strongly incline to Hawthorne’s idea that furniture becomes magnetized, permeated, semi-vitalized, so that the chairs, sofas, and tables that have outlived their dear owners in my own family have almost a sacred value to me.

Still, why moralize.  Estates must be settled, and auctions are a blessing in disguise.

Of course, buying so much by substitutes, I amassed a lot of curious things, of which I did not know the use or value, and therefore greatly enjoyed the experience of the Spectator as given in the Christian Union.

He attended an auction with the following result:  “A long table was covered with china, earthenware, and glass; and the mantel beyond, a narrow shelf quite near the ceiling, glittered with a tangled maze of clean brass candlesticks, steel snuffers, and plated trays.  At one end dangled a huge warming pan, and on the wall near it hung a bit of canvas in a gilded frame, from which the portrait had as utterly faded as he whom it represented had vanished into thin air.  It was a strange place, a room from