“My wife is the most infatuated bric-a-brac hunter I ever heard of.  She’s an uncommonly fine woman about most things; loves her children; makes splendid pies; don’t fool with any of those fan-dangling ways women have of fixing their hair; and she’s an angel for temper.  But she beats Mrs. Toodles for going to auctions.  She’s filled my house with the wildest mess of bric-a-brac and such stuff you ever came across outside of a museum of natural curiosities.  She’s spent more money for wrecks that wouldn’t be allowed in the cellar of a poor-house than’d keep a family in comfort for years.

“You know Scudmore, who sold out the other day?  She was there, bidding away like a millionaire.  Came home with a wagon-load of things—­four albata tea-pots without lids or handles; two posts of a bedstead and three slats; a couple of churns and fourteen second-hand sun-bonnets, and more mournful refuse like that.  Said she didn’t intend to buy, but she bid on them to run them up to help Mrs. Scudmore, and the auctioneer knocked them down quicker’n a wink.  Said it was ‘Lot 47,’ and she had to take it all.  And she said maybe she could make up the sun-bonnets into bibs for the baby and use the tea-pots for preserves.  She thought she might make a pretty fair bedstead out of the posts by propping the other ends on a chair; and she said it was a lucky thing she was so forehanded about those churns, because she might have a cow knocked down to her, and then she would be all ready for butter-making.  More’n likely she’ll buy some old steer and bring him home while she’s rummaging around for bric-a-brac.

“When the Paxtons had their sale in January she was around there, of course, and came home after dinner with the usual dismembered furniture; and when I said to her, ’Emma, why under Heaven did you buy in the mud-dredge and the sausage-stuffer?’ she said she thought the sausage-stuffer would do for a cannon for the boys on the Fourth of July, and there was no telling if Charley wouldn’t want to be a civil engineer when he grew up, and perhaps he’d get a contract for deepening the channel of the river; and then he’d rise up and bless the foresight of the mother who’d bought a mud-dredge for two dollars and saved it up for him.

“I sold that scoop on Wednesday for old iron for fifteen cents; and I’ll bang the head off of Charley if he ever goes to dredging mud or playing cannon with the sausage-stuffer.  I won’t have my boys carrying on in that way.

“Over there at Robinson’s sale I believe she’d’ve bid on the whole concern if I hadn’t come in while she was going it.  As it was, she bought an aneroid barometer, three dozen iron skewers, a sacking-bottom and four volumes of Eliza Cook’s poems.  Said she thought those volumes were some kind of cookery-books, or she wouldn’t have bid on them, and the barometer would be valuable to tell us which was north. North, mind you!  She thought it indicated the points of the compass.  And yet they want to let women vote!  I threw in those skewers along with the mud-dredge, and she’s used the sacking-bottom twice to patch Charley’s pants; and that’s all the good we ever got out of that auction.