exchange I gladly accepted as being less cumbersome, if not more beautiful. Surely the summer sunlight never flickered down on a more typical New England scene than a country auction. Sad are the faces around, quiet reigns; no one smiles, no one jests as the hoarse-voiced auctioneer holds up, explains, and extols some very mirth-provoking “lots.” This breaking up and disbanding of a home has no droll side to country minds. The last country auction I attended was at an old house in Rutland. At it were sold the effects of an ancient lady of ninety years, who had just died. Her nephew, a lively lad of eighty, carried away by the excitement of the sale, or by the sight of so much ready money, recklessly handed out to the auctioneer, as he stood under the dusty lilac bushes, a large number of articles of furniture and table-ware which had been temporarily stored in the house by the old lady’s housekeeper, an equally ancient matron. The unconscious theft was discovered late in the afternoon, just as we were about to drive off, and the old man, overcome with horror at his unwitting crime, or dread of the results of its discovery, tearfully forced us to disgorge half a dozen McDonough’s Victory plates and several mugs and pitchers which we had eagerly purchased and gleefully packed away. He “comforted us with apples,” however, pressing upon us a peck of red-streaked, spicy Sapsons to console us for our evident disappointment—and our sorrow that we had not sensibly and cannily departed at an earlier hour. But do not fancy that every gathering of country wagons in country door-yards, every row of patient horses hitched at barn doors and along the fence, denotes an auction within the doors of the farm-house. Draw no such rash conclusion, and make no hasty and unheralded entrance within, else you may find yourself, with china smiles on your lips and china inquiries on your tongue, an impetuous and mortified intruder at the saddest of all sad scenes, a country funeral. I cannot resist telling that, after one such impertinent intrusion on that solemn function, we returned in a few hours, when on our way home, to apologize and explain our infelicitous and uninvited entrance at so unfitting a time. When we stated that we were hunting for old-fashioned china, a gleam of comprehension entered the faces of the two elderly women who sat rocking by the fireside in the lonely kitchen, and as a result a china-closet was raided, and we bought a number of pieces of unusually fine Canton and Lowestoft china. At the time of purchase, we innocently fancied that we gained this treasure honestly from the new-made heirs, but have since then had harassing suspicions that the china was sold to us by temporary care-takers who remained to “redd the house,” while the mourning relatives had driven to the country graveyard, and who thus snatched from the jaws of death a most dishonest penny.