ill attend the sale with no intention of buying, but simply to
note the prices obtained, and, having traced the goods to their owners,
to get the same in better order and on better terms; the commission paid
to the auctioneer being divided, or wholly conceded by the seller to the
buyer, according to his estimate of the note.

A dry-goods buyer will sometimes spend a month in New York, the first
third or half of which he will devote to ascertaining what goods are in
the market, and what are to arrive; also to learning the mood of the
English, French, and Germans who hold the largest stocks. Sometimes
these gentlemen will make an early trial of their goods at auction.
Unsatisfactory results will rouse their phlegm or fire, and they declare
they will not send another piece of goods to auction, come what may. For
local or temporary reasons, buyers sometimes persist in holding back
till the season is so far advanced that the foreign gentlemen become
alarmed. Their credits in London, Paris, and Amsterdam are running out;
they are anxious to make remittances; and then ensues one of those
dry-goods panics so characteristic of New York and its mixed multitude;
an avalanche of goods descends upon the auction-rooms, and prices
drop ten, twenty, forty per cent., it may be, and the unlucky or
short-sighted men who made early purchases are in desperate haste to run
off their stocks before the market is irreparably broken down. Whether,
therefore, to buy early or late, in large or in small quantities, at
home or abroad,--are questions beset with difficulty. He who imports
largely may land his goods in a bare market and reap a golden harvest,
or in a market so glutted with goods that the large sums he counts out
to pay the duties may be but a fraction of the loss he knows to be
inevitable.

In addition to the problems belonging to time and place of purchasing,
to quantities and prices, there is a host of other problems begotten of
styles, of colors, of assortments, of texture and finish, of adaptation
to one market or another. The profit on a case of goods is often
sacrificed by the introduction or omission of one color or figure,
the presence or absence of which makes the merchandise desirable or
undesirable. Little less than omniscience will suffice to guard against
the sometimes sudden, and often most unaccountable, freaks of fashion,
whose fiat may doom a thing, in every respect admirably adapted to its
intended use, to irretrieva