ns I received at the first auction I ever attended that I am
now an inveterate sentimentalist.

How well I remember that auction! Looking back "through the dim posterns
of the mind" into the far-off days of my childhood, I see, among other
things, the large and comfortable mansion--it was the home of plenty and
the temple of hospitality--in which I passed some of the goldenest hours
of my boyhood. But the finest play has an end, and the sweetest feasts
and the merriest pastimes do not last forever. Very suddenly, indeed,
did my visits to that happy home cease. For my good friends of the
"great house"--the dearest old lady and the kindest and merriest old
gentleman that ever patted a little boy on the head--were both seized
(oh, woe the day!) by a terrible disease, and died in spite of all that
the great doctor from Boston did to cure them. The last time I entered
the dear old house was on a beautiful balmy summer morning; the birds
were singing as I have never heard them sing since, and all Nature
seemed as glad and exultant as if death, misfortune, and auctioneers
were banished from the world. I found there, in place of the late kind
host and hostess, a crowd--so they seemed to me--of rude and
coarse-minded people; and I saw the hateful red flag of the auctioneer
hanging over the door.

An eagle in a dove-cot, a fox in a barn-yard, a wolf among sheep, is
mild, merciful, and humane, when compared with the flock of human
vultures that had invaded this once happy residence, and were greedily
stripping it of all that the taste and the wealth of its late occupants
had furnished it with. Should I live to be a thousand years old, I do
not think I should forget the unladylike proceedings of sundry old women
at that auction. With what a free and contemptuous manner they examined
the fine old furniture, and handled the fine old china, and coolly
rummaged and ransacked every nook and corner, and peeped and pried into
every box, chest, and closet that was not locked! And their tongues, you
may be sure, were not idle the while!

The auctioneer was a little dried-up mummy of a man, the ugliness of
whose countenance was, as it were, emphasized by a disagreeable leer
which would ever and anon deepen into a broad grin; this man, with his
dreary jokes and vapid small-talk, was equally repulsive to me.

Oh, the tap of his little hammer did knock against my very heart!

Of all the hammers in this busy and hammering world, from the hug