nly 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----"

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