Here again the Old Auctioneer, having caught his cue broke in.  When he spoke, who could listen to Mr. Harpworth?

“... the best single piece in this sale, gentlemen!  I offer you now the Templeton family pride!  A choice product of old New England.  A little battered, but still good and sound.  The Templetons!  They never did anything notable except to work, work early and late, summer and winter, for three generations.  They were proud of any one who bore the Templeton name; they were proud even of Jim, simple Jim, who got a job driving the delivery wagon at the hill store, and drove it for twenty-two years and was drowned in Mill River.  I’ll tell you what family pride meant to old John Templeton....”

I thought he leaned forward to take us into his confidence, motioning at the same time toward the house.

“You know Julia Templeton——­”

Know her?  Of course we knew her!  Knew her as only the country knows its own.

“When Julia ran away with that sewing-machine agent—­it was her only chance!—­old John Templeton drove his best cow into town and sold her, he mortgaged his team of horses, and went after the girl and brought her home with him.  They were firm and strong and as righteous as God with her; and they paid off, without whining, the mortgages on the horses, and never spoke of the loss of the cow—­but never forgot it.  They held up their heads to the end.  Gentlemen, what am I offered for this interesting antique, this rare work of art?”

* * * * *

The auction was considered, upon the whole, a great success.  Mr. Harpworth himself said so.  Ike, the Jewish dealer, bought the family clock and the spring-tooth harrow, and even bid on the family crayon portraits (the frames could be sold for something or other); a Swede bought the pigs and the old buggy; an Irish teamster bid in John Templeton’s horses, and a Pole, a good man, I know him well, bought the land, and will no doubt keep his geese in the summer kitchen, and get rich from the cultivation of the ancient fields.  While old John Templeton bowed himself humbly before a wrathful God he would never go down on his knees, as the Poles do, to the fertile earth.  And—­I forgot—­an Italian from Nortontown bought for a song the apple and chestnut crops, and busy third generation Americans loaded in the antiques and drove off with them to the city.

The last I saw of Julia Templeton, that hard-favoured woman, she was standing, an angular figure, in the midst of the wreck of the luncheon dishes, one arm wrapped in her apron, the other hand shading her eyes while she watched the company, in wagons and automobiles, trailing away to the westward, and the towns....

The sale was over; but the most valuable antiques of all found no purchasers:  they were left behind with Julia Templeton:  only she could use them.

CHAPTER XII