Would you like to see an old-time Broadway comedy and an actor with a manner that was in style forty years ago? Would you like to listen to well-set flowery speeches? Get acquainted with Mr. Silo and his auction rooms on Vanderbilt Avenue, near Forty-sixth Street. He wears a cut-away and a goatee. He has the distinction of having auctioned off during the past forty years a greater part of the contents of many Knickerbocker Mansions. He seems to love each and every article that comes before his auction table. Everything is “exquisite, beautiful, grandiose, magnificent, stately.” He looks in the ecstasies of an overjoyed connoisseur at his paintings and drawings. He interjects once in a while his sorrow that Mr. Astor is not alive any more, who would have appreciated at once this or that painting. After such exclamations, he looks with sad contempt over his audience, shakes his head as though he wanted to say: “You poor simps, you do not appreciate real art.” He constantly urges: “Don’t buy this, don’t buy it, please don’t buy it. You will do me a favor if you do not buy it, because next week such and such a millionaire collector from California will be in town and he will pay me a far greater price than you intend to offer.” To emphasize his sincerity at least once during each sale, he would get up from his seat, stand erect with the solemnity of a preacher and declare: “If you are sorry to have purchased this article, please return it to me. I am forty years in the auction business; my word is as good as a bond and I will return the money.” And he makes good; at least he made good to me. In the folly of the minute I bought something that I had no earthly use for. I told him so and a couple of days later he refunded my purchasing price. What wonderful tales could the hundreds, often thousands, of gowns, wraps, dresses, suits, slippers, stockings, lingerie, furs, hats, gloves and many other intimate garments of pretty women tell, if they had voices to speak while they hang in long rows in Mr. Flatau’s auction rooms on University Place.