ass 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.

"There were craftsmen in those days, gentlemen," he was resuming; "look
at this example of their art--there is quality here and durability----"

At this point the Great Auctioneer broke in upon my attentio