These and like expressions met Harney on every side until at last, as he paused to answer some of them, growing heated in the altercation, and for the instant forgetting Rocket, the auctioneer brought the hammer down with a click which made Harney leap from the ground, for by that sound he knew that Rocket was sold to Alice Johnson for six hundred dollars! There was a horrid oath, a fierce scowl at Alice passing from his view, and then, with the muttered sneer, “I wonder if she intends to buy the farm and niggers?” Harney tried to hide his discomfiture by saying, “he was glad on the whole, for he did not really want the horse, and had only bidden from spite!” Meantime Alice had sought the friendly shelter of Ellen’s room, where the tension of nerve endured so long gave way, and sinking upon the sofa she fainted just as down the Lexington turnpike came the man looked for so long in the earlier part of the day. Alice had written to Mr. Liston a few weeks previous to the sale, and indulgent almost to a fault to his beautiful ward, he had replied that he would surely be at Mosside in time. He had kept his word, and it was his familiar voice which brought Alice back to consciousness; and pressing his hand, she told him what she had done, and asked if it were unmaidenly. She could not err, in Mr. Liston’s estimation, and with his assurance that all was right, Alice grew calm, and in a hurried consultation explained to him more definitely than her letter had done, what her wishes were—Colonel Tiffton must not be homeless in his old age. There were 10,000 dollars lying in the —— Bank in Massachusetts, and she would have Mosside purchased in her name for Colonel Tiffton, not as a gift, for he would not accept it, but as a loan, to be paid at his convenience. This was Alice’s plan, and Mr. Liston acted upon it at once. Taking his place in the motley assemblage, he bid quietly, steadily, until the whisper ran round, “Who is that man in that butternut-colored coat?” None knew who he was though all came to the conclusion that Harney’s hope of securing Mosside was as futile as had been his hope of getting Rocket. There were others disappointed, too—the fair matrons who coveted Mrs. Tiffton’s carpets, mirrors, and cut-glass, all of which passed to the stranger. When it came to the negroes he winced a little, wondering what his abolition friends would say to see him bidding off his own flesh and blood, but the end answered the means, he thought, and so he kept on until at last Mosside, with its appurtenances, belonged ostensibly to him, and the half glad, half disappointed people wondered greatly who _Mr. Jacob Liston_ could be, or from what quarter of the globe he had suddenly dropped into their midst.