esigned for him; but as it was valued at five hundred dollars and
could not be relinquished by the sheriff except on payment of that sum,
or by auction, and as Henry Cowperwood had no such sum to spare, he had
to let the desk go. There were many things they all wanted, and Anna
Adelaide had literally purloined a few though she did not admit the fact
to her parents until long afterward.

There came a day when the two houses in Girard Avenue were the scene
of a sheriffs sale, during which the general public, without let or
hindrance, was permitted to tramp through the rooms and examine the
pictures, statuary, and objects of art generally, which were
auctioned off to the highest bidder. Considerable fame had attached to
Cowperwood's activities in this field, owing in the first place to the
real merit of what he had brought together, and in the next place to the
enthusiastic comment of such men as Wilton Ellsworth, Fletcher Norton,
Gordon Strake--architects and art dealers whose judgment and taste were
considered important in Philadelphia. All of the lovely things by which
he had set great store--small bronzes, representative of the best
period of the Italian Renaissance; bits of Venetian glass which he had
collected with great care--a full curio case; statues by Powers, Hosmer,
and Thorwaldsen--things which would be smiled at thirty years later,
but which were of high value then; all of his pictures by representative
American painters from Gilbert to Eastman Johnson, together with a few
specimens of the current French and English schools, went for a song.
Art judgment in Philadelphia at this time was not exceedingly high;
and some of the pictures, for lack of appreciative understanding, were
disposed of at much too low a figure. Strake, Norton, and Ellsworth
were all present and bought liberally. Senator Simpson, Mollenhauer, and
Strobik came to see what they could see. The small-fry politicians
were there, en masse. But Simpson, calm judge of good art, secured
practically the best of all that was offered. To him went the curio
case of Venetian glass; one pair of tall blue-and-white Mohammedan
cylindrical vases; fourteen examples of Chinese jade, including several
artists' water-dishes and a pierced window-screen of the faintest tinge
of green. To Mollenhauer went the furniture and decorations of the
entry-hall and reception-room of Henry Cowperwood's house, and to Edward
Strobik two of Cowperwood's bird's-eye maple bedroom