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 huge
forge-hammer with which the brawny blacksmith deals telling blows upon
the glowing iron and beats it into shape, to the tiny hammer that the
watchmaker so deftly handles, the ivory-headed, ebony-handled instrument
of the auctioneer is the most potent. From the day it was first upraised
by the original auctioneer--the nameless and unknown founder of a mighty
line of auctioneers--over the chattels of some unfortunate mortal, to
the present time, when the red flag is constantly waving in all the
great cities and towns of the world, what an immense amount of property
of all kinds and descriptions has come under that little instrument! At
its fall the ancestral acres of how many spendthrift heirs have passed