With the floors painted and the windows drawn, we were now ready for the personal details which should make this house into a home. It was then that we had a great stroke of luck in hearing of an auction in another village some eight miles away and off the main road. Seth told us about it and said if I was looking for old trash he reckoned I could find enough of it there. He said he wouldn’t give a quarter for the whole lot, which didn’t sound very encouraging. But Ruth said she had heard them talk like that before, and anyway it would be good fun to go. One clear summer morning then we rose early and Ruth put up a lunch and we boarded the train. The nearest station was five miles away and there we hired an old white horse and a buggy. We jogged along over the country roads at a three-mile-an-hour clip and reached the place just before the auction started at ten o’clock. We found some thirty or forty natives there. Most of them had come just to look on. They always had time for that. Even in the busiest season it was as easy to gather a crowd in these out-of-the-way places as it is during the noon hour on Broadway. And they wouldn’t come for an hour, but for all day. We found rather a romantic story in connection with this auction. The story ran, and I guess it was true, that the man who had been living here as a bachelor for forty years had originally built and furnished this house for his bride. Just before they were to be married she had died and he had moved into the house and lived here by himself until his own death. When Ruth heard that, she said to me, “Billy, do you know I think he’d be glad for us to have his things.” “I don’t know how he’d feel about me, but I’m dead sure he’d be glad for you to have them,” I said. “He wouldn’t if it wasn’t for you,” she answered, with a smile. I’m not saying she was right in this deduction but I made up my mind she’d have whatever she liked at that auction if it broke me. There’s a lot in luck at auctions--for the buyer. And we were certainly in luck that day. There were no stray automobile parties in the group to boost things up for the fun of it, and no professional furniture buyers. It was a real country auction with a country auctioneer and a country crowd. Seth and Jim and Josh were there and the rest of the group was all of their kind. Both the men and the women looked bloodless and withered. It showed in their faded eyes, in their sallow cheeks, in their spare bodies. They seemed old and tired--even the young women. And the strange thing about it was that to me they looked like foreigners. I felt as though I had come into some distant country among a new people. I couldn’t seem to connect them with America; even with the America of history. It took an effort on my part to remember that the names they bore were the names borne by many of those who settled in Plymouth. I asked Ruth if she felt that way and after thinking a moment she answered, “Not as much as you do.”