His gaze sweeps the faces of the assemblage. It is a compelling gaze, indeed you might say mes-meristic. There is a touch of pathos in it, though, an unuttered appeal to the gathering to consider its own several interests.
"Do I hear four hundred?" He speaks of four hundred as an ostrich might speak of a tomtit's egg--as something comparatively insignificant and puny.
He clasps his hand to his brow. This is too much; it is much too much. But business is business. He rallies; he smiles bitterly, wanly. His soul within him is crushed and bruised, but he rallies. Rallying is one of the best things he does and one of the most frequent. The bidding livens, slackens, lags, then finally ceases. With a gesture betokening utter despair, with lineaments bathed in the very waters of woe, he heart-brokenly knocks the vase down to somebody for $88.50.
But by the time the hired men have fetched forth Lot 78 he miraculously has recovered his former confidence and for the forty-oddth time since two o'clock--it is now nearly three forty-five--is his old cheerful beaming self. Thirty seconds later his heart has been broken in a fresh place; yet we may be sure that to-morrow morning when he rises he will be whistling a merry roundelay, his faith in the innate goodness of human nature all made new and fully restored to him. He would make a perfectly bully selection if you were sending a messenger to a home to break to an unsuspecting household some such tragic tidings, say; as that the head of the family, while rounding a turn on high, had skidded and was now being removed from the front elevation of an adjacent brick wall with a putty knife. If example counted for anything at all, he would have the mourners all cheered up again and the females among them discussing the most becoming modes in black crepe in less than no time at all.
My, my, but how my sense of understanding did broaden under the influence of the auction sales we attended through the spring and on into the Summer. When the morning paper came we would turn to the advertising section and look for auction announcements. If there was to be one, and generally there was--one or more--we canceled all other plans and attended. Going to auctions became our regular employment, our pastime, our entertainment. It became our obsession. It almost became our joint calling in life. To our besetting mania we sacrificed all else.
