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More "Auctioneer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... upon his hogshead. "No one wants him," he exclaimed, imitating the accent of an auctioneer, to the great delight of all; "no one wants him? once, twice, three times!" and, turning towards the gibbet with a ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... hair hung in thick braids over both shoulders, and a burning red spot glowed on each cheek. For a moment she stood as Jake had directed, with head thrown back and eyes cast heavenward, then she began to recite. The words poured from her lips with a volubility that would have shamed an auctioneer. It was a long part, full of hard words, but she knew it perfectly and was determined to show how fast she could say it without making a mistake. It was only when she finished that she paused for breath. Then she turned slowly, and stretching forth appealing ...
— Lovey Mary • Alice Hegan Rice
... positively no book of that time and description any great value. Enderby at Barclay auction in March and made row over some book which he missed because it was put up out of turn in catalogue. Barclay auctioneer thinks it was one of Percival privately bound books 1680-1703. Am anonymous book of Percival library, De Meritis Librorum Britannorum, was sold to Colonel Graeme for $47, a good price. When do ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... she could do, but that may be the end of it. He's in an auctioneer's office, and may have a ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... mocked Sam. "She'll be discussing with him the future of the Greek drama. Too bad it doesn't happen to be Warfield, or mother could give him tips on the 'Auctioneer.'" ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... of claret was put up by the auctioneer, and, thinking this a good opportunity for laying in a stock for the mess, as we would be in commission probably in warm latitudes, for the next two or three years, when the wine would come in rather ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... time she wrote to an auctioneer in the Via due Macelli, requesting him to call upon her. The man came immediately. He had little beady eyes, which ranged round the dining-room and seemed to see everything except ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... his trade, and sells all the remarkable things. On this occasion the Pigot diamond had come into his hands. It is a very fine brilliant, but objected to by the connoisseurs as not having sufficient depth. It was valued at L40,000. But at this sale the auctioneer could not raise its price above L9500, or guineas. He then appealed to his audience, a crowd of the fair ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... was a Scotsman—a big, broad-shouldered Sawney—formidable in 'slacks,' as he called his trousers, and terrific in kilts; while Grimes was a native of Swillingford, an ex-schoolmaster and parish clerk, and now an auctioneer, a hatter, a dyer and bleacher, a paper-hanger, to which the wits said when he set up his paper, he added the trade ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... when we get there. The auctioneer is in the judge's stand at the track 'n' the hosses is showed ...
— Blister Jones • John Taintor Foote
... sale," shouted the auctioneer. "A genuine article, pretty near as good as brand-new. A real live baby, warranted to walk and talk a little. Who bids? A dollar? Did I hear anyone mean enough to bid a dollar? No, sir, babies don't come as cheap as ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... giving Tea to his Friends,' himself still the sole actor, and changing with Proteus-like celerity from one to the other. Then came his 'Auction of Pictures,' and Sir Thomas de Veil, one of his enemies, the justices, was introduced. Orator Henley and Cock the auctioneer figured also; and year after year the town was enchanted by that which is most gratifying to a polite audience, the finished exhibition of faults and follies. One stern voice was raised in reprobation, that of Samuel Johnson: he, at all events, had a due horror of buffoons; but even ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... be the last. There is always the third reading of a bill. The auctioneer usually cries, 'Third and last time,' not 'Second and last time,' and the banns of approaching marriage are called out three times. So, you see, I have the right to ask you one ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... wanted them, at a far lower rate. There is not a lot throughout which would recommend itself to modern taste, save the Cuisinier Francois, and perhaps that was not in the old morocco livery considered by judges as de rigueur. We append the auctioneer's account entire, because it exhibits a fair example of the class of book which not only Frenchmen, but ourselves, sought at that time more than those for which we have long learned to compete, and which were then offered under the hammer by the bundle, if ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... first advertised the sale was for three days, but the auctioneer found that he could not get through in the time. The accumulations of such an ancient house as Outram Hall are necessarily vast," and he waved his hand with ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... describe the Rookery properly: suffice it, however, to say it is a very handsome country place; with handsome lawns sloping down to the river, handsome shrubberies and conservatories, fine stables, outhouses, kitchen-gardens, and everything belonging to a first-rate rus in urbe, as the great auctioneer called it when he hammered it ...
— The History of Samuel Titmarsh - and the Great Hoggarty Diamond • William Makepeace Thackeray
... did not want her, nor did that, nor alas! the other! Each and every one were eager for the boy. The auctioneer's instructions had been to sell the two together, if possible, if not, at all events to sell the boy, as he would command a good price, and ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... said Mrs. Proudie, "what difficulty? The place has been promised to Mr. Quiverful, and of course he must have it. He has made all his arrangements. He has written for a curate for Puddingdale, he has spoken to the auctioneer about selling his farm, horses, and cows, and in all respects considers the place as his own. Of ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... his father's death, he was favoured with quite the usual crowd of would-be buyers. Almost everyone with either money or credit within a radius of twenty miles came into Carrowkeel for the occasion. The presiding auctioneer had done his duty beforehand by advertising old Mr. Conneally's mouldy furniture as 'magnificently upholstered suites,' and his battered editions of the classics as 'a valuable library of handsomely bound books.' ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... he did so," said the good auctioneer, trying to throw something soothing into his iteration. "I was about to fulfil his order, if possible, this afternoon. He wished me ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... so many complications in its train, commenced with a very small incident. A certain Bezeidenhout, having refused to pay his taxes, had, by order, some of his goods seized and put up to auction. This was the signal for the malcontents to attack the auctioneer and rescue the goods. So great became the uproar and confusion, the women aiding and abetting the men in their disobedience of the law, that military assistance was summoned. Major Thornhill, with a few companies of the 21st Regiment, was sent ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... sticking on edge in the pipeclay bottom. I found some gold also in Sheep's Head, and then we heard of a rush on the Goulburn River. Next day we offered our spare mining plant for sale on the roadside opposite Specimen Hill, placing the tubs, cradles, picks and spades all in a row. Bez was the auctioneer. He called out aloud, and soon gathered a crowd, which he fascinated by his eloquence. The bidding was spirited, and every article was sold, even Bez's own two-man pick, which would break the heart of a ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... his usual poor health." He turned again to Margaret. "No one could mistake my father for an auctioneer. He has so few admirations. But he knew your father ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... the subject when he is in the passive state, and making him believe anything he is told, as, for example, that a handkerchief is a snake, that a piece of money is burning hot, or that he is a king, a hero, an orator, an auctioneer, or anything else suggested by the fancy of the operator, which is at once carried into personation by the subject. This is a familiar, popular exhibition, which never fails to attract and amuse, but has unfortunately not been ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... turning the winches of a winnowing machine. New hats, but old faces. Could his great-great-grandfather have been dug up and set in that barn door, he would have looked just the same, so would the sacks, and the wheat, and the sunshine. At the market town, where the auctioneer's hammer goes tap tap over bullocks and sheep, crowds of men gather together,—farmers, and bailiffs, and shepherds, drovers and labourers—and their clothes are different, but there are the same old weather-beaten faces. Faces that you may see in the ancient illuminated manuscripts, ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... off," exclaimed Daae. "I will be the auctioneer, and this key to the graveyard will serve ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... institution employing all these agencies, every one of them fully equipped and manned, and with streams of money flowing in to their support; no barren appeals from the pulpit for funds to pay expenses, and no auctioneer's hammer profaning ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... GREEN was an auctioneer, And made three hundred pounds a year; And HARRIET HALE, most strange to say, Gave pianoforte lessons ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... horses, sheep, and swine are raised for the market. Slave-rearing is there looked upon as a legitimate trade; the law sanctions it, public opinion upholds it, the church does not condemn it. It goes on in all its bloody horrors, sustained by the auctioneer's block. If you would see the cruelties of this system, hear the following narrative. Not long since the following scene occurred. A slave-woman and a slaveman had united themselves as man and wife in the absence of any law to ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... through the gates of the chateau, the rasping voice of the lean-jawed auctioneer reached my ears as he harangued in the drizzling rain before the steps of the chateau the group of peasants gathered before him—widows in rusty crepe veils, shrewd old Norman farmers in blue blouses looking for bargains, their carts wheeled up on the mud-smeared lawn. And a few second-hand dealers ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... A queer old looking-glass! Hetty got into an ill temper with it almost every time she dressed. It had been considered a handsome glass in its day, and had probably been bought into the Poyser family a quarter of a century before, at a sale of genteel household furniture. Even now an auctioneer could say something for it: it had a great deal of tarnished gilding about it; it had a firm mahogany base, well supplied with drawers, which opened with a decided jerk and sent the contents leaping ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... conscientia, to tell herself that she had done it; Mrs. Baxter approved, saying that this was what the second Mrs. Greening had done when her husband's sister's daughter, a very emancipated young woman as it seemed, had incomprehensibly flirted with the auctioneer's apprentice and had scouted Mrs. Greening's control; Mrs. Greening had told the girl's mother and sent the girl home, second class, under the care of the guard. Similarly then Lady Richard, without embarking on any consideration of ultimate problems, wrote to May, ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... van-load of luggage backing away from the door. The care-taker told me that Mrs. Ambrose was sailing the next morning. Not long afterward I saw the library table with the helmeted knights standing before an auctioneer's door in University Place; and I looked with a pang at the familiar ink-stains, in which I had so often traced the geography of ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... cataleptic. If Cook or Streaker went overhead after dark, we knew we should presently hear a bump on the ceiling; and this took place so constantly, that it was as if a fighting man were engaged to go about the house, administering a touch of his art which I believe is called The Auctioneer, to ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... mart. On walking up he learned that it was a sheriff's sale of a "likely young negro girl." Remembering that Emma had requested him to purchase a girl as a waiting maid for her, he examined the slave and found her in all respects the kind of house servant he desired. Going up to the auctioneer who had just mounted a bench for the purpose of selling the slave, he enquired where she had come from. The auctioneer responded by handing the doctor a small hand bill setting forth the sale. After reading it he walked up to the slave and ...
— The Trials of the Soldier's Wife - A Tale of the Second American Revolution • Alex St. Clair Abrams
... will be disposed of by auction to-morrow afternoon at the Theatrical Garden Party. Mr. Bobby is going to act as auctioneer." ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... auctioneer, "once. Two-pence, twice. Will no one bid higher? It is going for nothing, the key is worth more. Have ...
— The Young Emigrants; Madelaine Tube; The Boy and the Book; and - Crystal Palace • Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick
... two men, occupied with their own thoughts, closed their eyes; but not so Smith. Nothing, to the smallest detail, escaped him. He appraised everything with as perfect an appreciation of its value as an auctioneer. ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... I had intended for publication in my book entitled "THE AUCTIONEER'S GUIDE," I was advised by a few of my most intimate friends to add a sketch of my own life to illustrate what had been set forth ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston
... of brogues," said the old man, holding a pair of old boots up for inspection like an auctioneer, "would fetch half a dollar any day in the wake in any sayport in the world. Put them beside you, Dick, and lay hold of this pair of britches by the ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... about from door to door soliciting for sewing, the knowledge that if he should cease or falter four women might be on the street the next night, keeps him happy, and not even when he was county attorney or in the real estate business nor writing insurance, nor disporting himself as an auctioneer was Mr. Fenn ever in his own mind a person of so much use and consequence. So his Heaven needs no east wind to belly it out. Mr. Fenn's Heaven is full and fat and prosperous—even on two meals a day ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... Side where the light was let in. Bone Alley brought thirty-seven dollars under the auctioneer's hammer. Thieves' Alley, in the other park down at Rutgers Square, where the police clubbed the Jewish cloakmakers a few years ago for the offence of gathering to assert their right to "being men, live the life of men," as some one who knew summed up the labor movement, ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... Flaccus [Horace], Latin poet and satirist, was born near Venusia, in Southern Italy, on December 8, 65 B.C. His father was a manumitted slave, who as a collector of taxes or an auctioneer had saved enough money to buy a small estate, and thus belonged to the same class of small Italian freeholders as the parents of Virgil. Apparently Horace was an only child, and as such received an education almost beyond his father's means; who, instead of sending him to school ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... Constitution. For what is it but a scheme for taxing the colonies in the antechamber of the noble lord and his successors? To settle the quotas and proportions in this House is clearly impossible. You, Sir, may flatter yourself you shall sit a state auctioneer, with your hammer in your hand, and knock down to each colony as it bids. But to settle (on the plan laid down by the noble lord) the true proportional payment for four or five and twenty governments, according to the absolute and the relative wealth of each, and according to the British ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... dismal rites performed, I put my chambers into the hands of a house agent and interviewed a firm of auctioneers with reference to the sale. It was all exceedingly unpleasant. The agent was so anxious to let my chambers, the auctioneer so delighted at the chance of selling my effects, that I felt myself forthwith turned neck and crop out of doors. It was a bright morning in early spring, with a satirical touch of hope in the air. London, no longer to be my London, maintained its ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... "Gaspard," cried the auctioneer, addressing the young man of the tumbrel, "Suzanne would no longer hesitate if she saw you in such a hat. And with the trunk, too. Ah, mon Dieu, can you afford to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the player the sort of nod one gives an auctioneer, and the singers stopped. "I think we can," said the actor, "and that if the senator votes yea so will every one. All in favor of withdrawing the petition raise the right hand. It ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... shall be writing to her this week,' she replied; and she promised to get any information she could for me within a fortnight, by which time I expected to pass that way again. I did so, and Mrs. Smith proved as good as her word. The niece had got the cup from a friend of hers, an auctioneer, and he, not she, had got it at a sale. But he was away from home—she could hear nothing more at present. She gave his address, however, and assurances that he was very good-natured and would gladly put the gentleman in the way of getting ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... the city the trio passed a slave auction. A vigorous and comely mulatto girl was being sold. She underwent a thorough examination at the hands of the bidders; they pinched her flesh, and made her trot up and down the room like a horse, to show how she moved, and in order, as the auctioneer said, that 'bidders might satisfy themselves' whether the article they were offering to buy was sound or not. The whole thing was so revolting that Lincoln moved away from the scene with a deep feeling of 'unconquerable hate.' Bidding his companions follow him, he said, 'Boys, let's get away ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... the old man did not seem to realise the purpose of the gathering. But when he saw the auctioneer mount a box alongside of him and call for bids, the truth of the entire situation dawned upon him. He was to be sold as a pauper to the lowest bidder, so he heard the auctioneer say. For an instant a deep feeling of anger stirred within his bosom, and ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... should be away the last week her home was to wear its accustomed face, she did not say so, even to herself. It seemed to her a poor habit to wish for what was obviously not to be, and all by herself she set upon the day for the sale of her goods and sent for the auctioneer to come. ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... room to room, thoroughly exploring the dense throng about the auctioneer, but without finding either Gheta, Anna Mantegazza ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... and gentlemen," he cried, with the air of an auctioneer who is about to sell it to the highest bidder, "very fine example from the eighteenth dynasty. Here is the cartouche of Thotmes the Third," he pointed up with his donkey-whip at the rude, but deep, hieroglyphics ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... and made open the shutters in front and walk out and in through the door, before the very eyes of the police. Then he have an auction in that house, and advertise it, and put up big notice. And when the day come he sell off by a great auctioneer all the goods of that other man who own them. Then he go to a builder, and he sell him that house, making an agreement that he pull it down and take all away within a certain time. And your police and other authority help him all they can. And when that owner come back ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... Tuesday slaves were brought in from Virginia and sold on de block. De auctioneer was Cap'n Dorsey. E. M. Cobb was de slave bringer. They would stand de slaves up on de block and talk about what a fine looking specimen of black manhood or womanhood dey was, tell how healthy dey was, look in their mouth and examine their teeth just like ...
— Slave Narratives, Oklahoma - A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From - Interviews with Former Slaves • Various
... the colleges, nor their works, nor their ways. Jude was asked if he could suggest any guest in addition to those named by Arabella and her father, and in a saturnine humour of perfect recklessness mentioned Uncle Joe, and Stagg, and the decayed auctioneer, and others whom he remembered as having been frequenters of the well-known tavern during his bout therein years before. He also suggested Freckles and Bower o' Bliss. Arabella took him at his word so far as the men went, but drew the line ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... mansion, was moderate in size, but it was ample for the requirements of any ordinarily wealthy family. The dining-room, library, drawing-rooms, and breakfast-room, were all large and well-arranged. The hall was handsome and spacious, and the bed-rooms were sufficiently numerous to make an auctioneer's mouth water. But the great charm of Ongar Park lay in the grounds immediately round the house, which sloped down from the terrace before the windows to a fast-running stream which was almost hidden—but was not hidden—by the shrubs on its bank. Though ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... Newtimber, near Hurstpierpoint, and managed to serve both to a great age. He lived to be eighty-four and died full of vigour in 1831. In 1817, following upon a quarrel with the squire, the Newtimber living was put up for auction in London. Mr. Whistler decided to be present, but anonymous. The auctioneer mentioned in his introduction the various charms of the benefice, ending with the superlative advantage that it was held by an aged and infirm clergyman with one foot in the grave. At this point the proceedings were interrupted by a ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... carefully over the three miles of flinty macadam which led from his old house to his new one, and was put to bed again in a large, half-warmed apartment, fitted up scantily and provisionally with an old chamber-set that had escaped the auctioneer. His own illness and his daughter's marriage had almost brought the furnishing of the new house to a stand-still, while the anxiety of the purchasers of the old place to get their foundations in before ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... in our days, but probably we would not endure, and certainly there would be little praise for, some of the death scenes once famous in drama. The critics nowadays would apply to the actress the phrase of the auctioneer to his wife, and implore her to "get on with ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... piled up the forgotten rugs and novels, tidying the deck for the night, but still the embittered musician tramped to and fro under the silent stars. Only from the smoking-room where the amateur auctioneer was still hilariously selling the numbers for a sweepstake, came sounds in discord with the solemnity of sky and sea, and the artist was newly jarred at this vulgar gaiety flung in the face of the spacious and starry mystery of the night. And these jocose, heavy-jowled, smoke-soused gamblers ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... it was stated to have been in the family of the owner, who sent it for sale, for some 200 years. The pipe was of wood constructed in four pieces of strange shape, rudely carved with dogs' heads and faces of Red Indians. According to legend it had been presented to Raleigh by the Indians. The auctioneer, Mr. Stevens, remarked that unfortunately a parchment document about the pipe was lost some years ago, and declared, "If we could only produce the parchment the pipe would fetch L500." In the end, however, it was knocked down at ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... swiggle my way through the crowd, and get into the house. And when I did, who should I see but deacon Westfall, a smooth faced, slick haired, meechin' lookin' chap as you'd see in a hundred, a-standin' on a stool, with an auctioneer's hammer in his hand; and afore him was one Jerry Oaks and his wife, and two little orphan children, the prettiest little toads I ever beheld in all my born days. 'Gentlemen,' said he, 'I will begin the sale by putting up Jerry Oaks, of Apple ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... The harsh auctioneer to sympathy cold, Tears the babe from its mother and sells it for gold; While the infant and mother, loud shriek for each other, ...
— The Liberty Minstrel • George W. Clark
... they would be termed by an auctioneer in England—are excellent. Many of them are, in fact, large mansions, and are surrounded with grounds which, as the shrubs grow up, will be very beautiful. Some have large, well-kept lawns, stretching down to the rocks, and these, to my taste, give the charm ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... nearly an hour, and could hear the hum of voices in the hall, but no words, when Coleman came back, accompanied by a committee, of which I think the two brothers Arrington, Thomas Smiley the auctioneer, Seymour, Truett, and others, were members. The whole conversation was gone over again, and the Governor's proposition was positively agreed to, with this further condition, that the Vigilance Committee should send into the jail a small force of their own men, to make certain that Casey ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... to slacken and sales were few. Some of the people had gone home and others were going, and still there were quantities of goods unsold. An auction was the only alternative and Mr. Bills, who, to his office of school commissioner, added that of auctioneer, was sent for. There was no one like him in Crompton for disposing of whatever was to be disposed of, from a tin can to a stove-pipe hat. He could judge accurately the nature and disposition of his audience,—knew just what to say and when to say it, and had the faculty of ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... farthings the carcass. Retail shop next door, ma'am. Jack, serve the lady. Bill, tell him he can send me home those twenty bullocks, at three half-pence each—' and so on. But at night he subsides into an auctioneer, and, with knocking down lots while others are conversing, gets removed occasionally to a padded room. Sometimes we humor him, and he sells us the furniture after a spirited competition, and debits the amounts, for cash is not abundant ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... reader, thou hast patient been of late, While I, without remorse of rhyme, or fear, Have built and laid out ground at such a rate, Dan Phoebus takes me for an auctioneer. That poets were so from their earliest date, By Homer's 'Catalogue of ships' is clear; But a mere modern must be moderate— I spare you then the furniture ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... at auction, (For before the war I often go to the slave-mart and watch the sale,) I help the auctioneer, the sloven does not ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... the ephemera of the same wide-spread spirit of reckless folly. Millions in value pass out of these streets, that go to feed the vanity of those who fancy themselves wealthy, because they hold some ideal pledges for the payment of advances in price like those mentioned by the auctioneer, and which have some such security for the eventual payment, as one can find in calling a thing, that is really worth a dollar, worth ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... of this character In Mr. DICKENS' romance, is an auctioneer. The present Adapter can think of no nearer American equivalent, in the way of a person at once resident in a suburb and who sells to the highest bidder, than a supposable member of the New ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870 • Various
... aside wares, of useless Jessir, such as dry and wrinkled old negresses, worn-out, venomous nurses, human refuse, so to speak, to whom it was a matter of the most profound indifference what master they were called upon to serve, who listened to the slang of the auctioneer with absolute nonchalance as he circumstantially totted up their years and described their qualities, and allowed their would-be purchasers to examine their teeth and manipulate their arms and legs as if they were the very last persons concerned ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... union of opposites makes the happiest marriage, and perhaps it is on the same principle that men who chum are always so oddly assorted. You shall find a man of letters sharing diggings with an auctioneer, and a medical student pigging with a stockbroker's clerk. Perhaps each thus escapes the temptation to talk "shop" in his hours of leisure, while he supplements his own experiences of ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... my duty, by and by, to christen the boy,—a duty not done in a day. At present, I have no doubt that the bishop will do very well without me. Let the day stand, or if you put it off, upon my word and honor I believe that the wicked auctioneer will put off the book-sale also. Of one thing I am quite sure, that the sale and the christening will take place at the same time." There was no getting over this; but I am certain my dear mother had much less heart than before in uncovering ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... impossible to sell this "lot" alone, the Spaniard with the whip ordered George to be released and placed upon the block also, stepping forward at the same time and whispering eagerly in the ear of the auctioneer. ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... distinguished gentleman, who has been much at the South, is spending a little time in my family. He told me but this day, that he had frequently known the air filled with shrieks of anguish for a whole mile around the spot, where, under the hammer of the auctioneer, the members of a family were undergoing an endless separation from each other. It was but last week, that a poor fugitive reached a family, in which God's commands, "Hide the outcasts, betray not him that wandereth"—"Hide not thyself from thy own flesh"—are ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... to be present this last evening of the fair, for everyone was anxious to make the most of it, and Edna thought it great fun to watch the auctioneer who was selling off some of the larger articles. She was intensely interested when Mr. Martin began bidding on a set of books, and was quite as triumphant as he was when they were knocked down ...
— A Dear Little Girl • Amy E. Blanchard
... at public auction, say in Alaska, where women are scarce, she would bring some price; but her digestion isn't very good and her heart is quite weak and her hair is falling out. But these things, of course, the auctioneer wouldn't reveal. She would make a fine Duchess, but the market just now is overstocked with Duchesses. And she is a good provider when furnished with ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... slacking off, as the price mounted above the means of the neighboring farmers. The chief aspirant was a stranger, a well-dressed man with a lawyer's air, whom nobody knew. After the usual long pauses and passionate exhortations, the hammer fell, and the auctioneer, turning to ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... to speculate immediately upon the identity of this bachelor friend of Mr. Fairfax's. It was not a garrison town. The young men of the place were for the most part small professional men—half-a-dozen lawyers and doctors, two or three curates, a couple of bankers' sons, an auctioneer or two, ranking vaguely between the trading and professional classes, and the sons of tradesmen. Among them all Mr. Granger could remember no one likely to be a friend of George Fairfax. It might possibly be one of the curates; but it seemed scarcely probable that Mr. Fairfax would come two ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... concierge, who at once informed him that after the Baroness's death her furniture and personal effects had been taken to the great auction mart in the Rue Drouot; the sale being conducted by M. Petit, the eminent auctioneer. ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... a poem to Sir Charles Fludyer on the devastation effected on his marine villa at Felixstowe by the encroachments of the sea. The answer to the enigma, Mrs. FitzGerald (Lucy Barton) told Canon Ainger, was not money but an auctioneer's hammer. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the Same Verses Written Immediately after Reading Horace Smith's "Bachelor's Fare!" Stanzas on the Fearful Struggle in Europe, 1854 Lines Written on the Morning, of the Dreadful Fire, March 9, 1854 To the Rev. J. W. and his Bride Stanzas on hearing an Auctioneer quote Scripture Winter's Ravages; An Appeal A Canadian National Song A Call to the Soiree An Address by the Members of the Institute at the Soiree Alcohol's Arraignment and Doom To Mr. James Woodyatt On hearing of Dr. O'Carr's Death Stanzas suggested by the Railway ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... right," said the auctioneer, laughing (and the master of the slave re-echoed his laugh and his answer); "let us see whether we cannot light upon a ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... winter's afternoon, in the year 1806, the little crowd that had been attending a sale of furniture at the chief auctioneer's in Wolverhampton was slowly melting away, for the few lots still left to be sold mostly consisted of worn-out saucepans, broken towel-rails, and some shabby ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... which place we were destined finally to be scattered to the four winds. From here we sent back most of our horses and mules, with others from the Brigade, to an Auction sale at Prisches, where they were sold in a most entertaining manner by a French Auctioneer at good prices to the local inhabitants. Our Transport vehicles were sent to the Divisional Park ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman
... Madrid, when he took the place of Pius Fifth as sponsor of Infanta Isabella. Ah, what treasures! But you go like the wind," he added, "and perhaps it is better, for I would stop, and Cavalier Fossati, the auctioneer, to whom those terrible creditors of Peppino have given charge of the sale, has spies everywhere. You notice an object, you are marked as a solid man, as they say in Germany. You are noted. I shall be down ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... "They sell the inmates of the poor-house, every year, to the highest bidder,—sell their labor by the year. They have 'em get up on a auction block, and hire a auctioneer, and sell 'em at so much a head, to the crowd. Why, some of 'em bring as high as twenty ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... The auctioneer, offering the pasture lot for sale, waved his hand enthusiastically, pointed toward the rich expanse of herbage, ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... of his brother artists in all but his art. He hated school and at twelve years of age was taken from it. His father wanted him to become a warehouse merchant like himself, and he began life as clerk or apprentice to an auctioneer. He next went into the employment of some calico-printers of Manchester. The designing of calicoes can hardly be called art, even if the department of design had fallen to Holman Hunt's lot and we have no evidence that it did, ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... china were first to be disposed of. The long drawing-room was full of camp chairs, and the audience had begun to assemble when Rosalind entered and sat down in a corner to wait for her uncle, who was interviewing the auctioneer. Two rows in front of her she saw Miss Betty, with Mrs. Parton ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... at the uniform which in colour and texture was all that the auctioneer claimed, and fingered a small package of gold in his pocket. At that moment some one bid fifty dollars, and Prescott surveyed him ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... Stator, and the property of Cnaeus Pompeius Magnus—(miserable that I am, for even now that my tears have ceased to flow, my grief remains deeply implanted in my heart,)—the property, I say, of Cnaeus Pompeius the Great was submitted to the pitiless, voice of the auctioneer. On that one occasion the state forgot its slavery, and groaned aloud, and though men's minds were enslaved, as everything was kept under by fear, still the groans of the Roman people were free. While all men were waiting to see who would be so impious, who would be so mad, who would be so declared ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... three years. Of all the family, Charlie was the one that caused his friends the most anxiety. He was a fine, spirited, intelligent boy; and Uncle Josie had promised to procure a situation for him, with his son-in-law, a commission-merchant and auctioneer, in New York. This plan was very pleasing to Mrs. Hubbard and Miss Patsey; but, unfortunately, Charlie seemed to have no taste for making money, and a fondness for pictures and pencils, that amounted almost to a passion. Here was an unexpected obstacle; Charlie was the pet and spoiled child ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... not been able to pay his debts. The mortgage on the farm had been foreclosed. Day of sale had come. The sheriff stood on a box reading the terms of vendue. All payments to be made in six months. The auctioneer took his place. The old man and his wife and the children all cried as the piano, and the chairs, and the pictures, and the carpets, and the bedsteads went at half their worth. When the piano went, it seemed to the old people as if the sheriff ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... generally, my dear, is valued precisely at cost price," retorted Mr. Pennycoop, who, as an auctioneer of twenty years' experience, had enjoyed much opportunity of testing the attitude of the public ...
— The Cost of Kindness - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... would fain not die "pop." MAR. You are Rose Maybud? ROSE. Yes, sweet Rose Maybud! MAR. Strange! They told me she was beautiful! And he loves you! No, no! If I thought that, I would treat you as the auctioneer and land-agent treated the lady-bird—I would rend you asunder! ROSE. Nay, be pacified, for behold I am pledged to another, and Lo, we are to be wedded this very day! MAR. Swear me that! Come to a Commissioner and let me have it on affidavit! ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... had taken the field in person. Rumours were numerous; we could not have come at a better time, and our trip promised to be one of interest. His highness's postmaster, a gigantic warrior,[7] waited on us to furnish mules and guides. Cesarea Petrarca, gentleman, of Cattaro, hairdresser, auctioneer, and appraiser, ex-courier, formerly chef de cuisine to the Vladika—an "homme capable," as he not unaptly styled himself, attended us to cook and interpret; and we started for Cettigna on the 17th of November, about nine o'clock. I may here say a few words concerning ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... butcher shops, four real estate offices, a furniture store, a drugstore, a jewellery store, a steam laundry, a flour and feed store, a shoe-shop, a bakery, and a bookshop. Three barbers had hung out their signs, and so had two doctors, a photographer, a lawyer, a dentist, and an auctioneer. There were two pool-rooms ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... in which the charter of a corporation may be regarded. In the first place, it may be thought of simply as a license terminable at will by the State, like a liquor-seller's license or an auctioneer's license, but affording the incorporators, so long as it remains in force, the privileges and advantages of doing business in the form of a corporation. Nowadays, indeed, when corporate charters are usually issued to all legally qualified applicants by an ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... a sale of the household effects, the horses and general possessions of Medallion the auctioneer, who, though a Protestant and an Englishman, had, by his wits and goodness of heart, endeared himself to the parish. Therefore the notables among the habitants had gathered in his empty house for a last drink of good-fellowship—Muroc the charcoalman, Duclosse the mealman, Benoit the ne'er-do-weel, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the barn when the sound of the auctioneer's voice in the corn-yard made her look over the half-door and listen. Gradually the truth dawned upon her; and she burst into tears over an old rake which she had been accustomed to call hers, because she had always dragged it at hay-making. Then wiping her eyes hastily—for, partly from her ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... result, of inner dissolution. Through the door of the hoarding the two pillars of the front door told a sorry tale. Pasted on either of them was a dingy bill, bearing the sinister imprimatur of an auctioneer, and offering (in capitals of various sizes) Bedroom Suites (Walnut and Mahogany), Turkey, Indian and Wilton Pile Carpets, Two Full-sized Billiard-Tables, a Remington Type-writer, a Double Door (Fire-Proof), and other objects not less useful and delightful. The club, then, ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... the day and his books and records fetched fabulous prices. But one special tome, ponderous, silver-clasped and locked, entitled: "Macrobiotic, The True and Complete Secret of Long, Healthy Life," was the cynosure of every avaricious eye. The auctioneer shrewdly reserved it until the last. Amidst a scene of unparalleled excitement and competition the Great Book was at length knocked down to a famous London physician for no less a sum than seven thousand Gulden. When opened with eager anticipation ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... advance in a line almost to the centre of the slave market, within two or three yards of the arcade, where the wealthy buyers sit expectant. Then the head auctioneer lifts up his voice, and prays, with downcast eyes and outspread hands. He recites the glory of Allah, the One, who made the heaven above and the earth beneath, the sea and all that is therein; his brethren and the buyers say Amen. He thanks Allah for his mercy to men in sending Mohammed ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... on the ship, one of them given for the benefit of the Seamen's Orphanage. One of his adopted granddaughters—"Charley" he called her—played a violin solo and Clemens made a speech. Later his autographs were sold at auction. Dr. Patton was auctioneer, and one autographed postal card brought twenty-five dollars, which is perhaps the record price for a single Mark Twain signature. He wore his white suit on this occasion, and in the course of his speech referred to it. He told first of the many defects in his behavior, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... novelist, whose real name was Frederick John Fargus, was born December 26, 1847, the son of a Bristol auctioneer. His early ambition was to lead a seafaring life, and with this object he entered the school frigate Conway—from which he took his pseudonym—then stationed on the Mersey. His father was against the project, with the result that Conway abandoned the idea and entered his parent's office, ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... lay, all covered with dust, in that auctioneer's window in Chico. We had just arrived from Sheridan, Sutter County, where we had conducted a successful series ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... make merchandise of them; "my valuable collection" being often the form in which strangers solicit the flattering boon. Once I had a queer proof as to the money value of my own,—as thus: I went quite casually into an auctioneer's in Piccadilly, to a book-sale; a lot of some half-dozen volumes were just being knocked down for next to nothing (such is our deterioration in these newspaper days) when the wielder of Thor's fateful hammer, dissatisfied at the price, asked for the lot to look at,—and coming ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... paid. I remonstrated over and over again, and was from time to time met with solemn promises, the debtor gaining time by every delay. At last I lost patience, and determined to distrain. Everybody laughed at me. 'Where will you get an auctioneer, and who will bid? they asked. I determined to carry through this one case, if it cost a hundred pounds. I got a good revolver, and succeeded in bringing an auctioneer from a distance. The debtor said he would brain me with ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... your man came, just now, to learn if I would see you, I was on the point of sending for you, to ask if you didn't mean to go on. I wanted to judge what I'm letting you have. This sala is very grand," she pursued, like an auctioneer, moving a little, as I guessed, her invisible eyes. "I don't believe you often have lived in ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... died and whose furniture was for sale. Just at that moment a parrot was at auction. He had green feathers and a blue head and was watching everybody with a displeased look. "Three francs!" cried the auctioneer. "A bird that can talk like a lawyer, ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... his criticism takes no account whatever of one form of appeal to the emotions which has been brought by later art to a high pitch of perfection, but with which the personal feeling of the artist has not much more to do than the "passions" of an auctioneer's clerk have to do with the compilation of his inventory. A poet himself, Horace wrote for poets; to him the pathetic implied the ideal, the imaginative, the rhetorical; he lived before the age of Realism and the Realists, and would scarcely have comprehended either ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... poor health." He turned again to Margaret. "No one could mistake my father for an auctioneer. He has so few admirations. But he knew your ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... philanthropist, William W. Corcoran, was born in 1798. He began his business career in Georgetown, but for many years he has been a resident of Washington. At twenty he went into business for himself, beginning as an auctioneer. After several years of successful business he was obliged to suspend, during the depressed times ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... of one thousandth of a second," announced Uncle Teddy, displaying all the fine points of his treasure like an auctioneer. "Won't I get some great pictures of you folks diving, though!" And he stood looking at the thing in his hands as if he did not quite believe it was real. Then he came to himself with a start and tossed the pack of letters to Katherine to distribute, ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... but it was ample for the requirements of any ordinarily wealthy family. The dining-room, library, drawing-rooms, and breakfast-room, were all large and well-arranged. The hall was handsome and spacious, and the bed-rooms were sufficiently numerous to make an auctioneer's mouth water. But the great charm of Ongar Park lay in the grounds immediately round the house, which sloped down from the terrace before the windows to a fast-running stream which was almost hidden—but was not hidden—by the shrubs on its bank. Though the domain ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... of playing at living. The sky shone brightly overhead; around the town stood hills which no romantic scene-painter could have bettered; the air of the man with water-cart, of the auctioneer's man with bell, and of the people popping in and out of the shops, was the air of those who did these things for love ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... a house in which all the rooms are on the ground-floor. An auctioneer's advertisement often runs—"large weatherboard cottage, twelve rooms, etc.," or "double-fronted brick cottage." The cheapness of land caused nearly all suburban houses in Australia to be built ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... even the non-Nodin bills through at the "Australasia." At the corner opposite the Shakespeare was the Melbourne Auction Company, where I first met my most worthy old friend, George Sinclair Brodie, so well known for ten years after as the leading Melbourne auctioneer, or rather "broker," for that is nearer the home equivalent. He was the salesman, while a genial and amusing good fellow, John Carey, from Guernsey, was manager. The company had just paid 20 per cent dividend—the first as well as the last ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... a perfect poem, with the beauty, and the felicity, and the glory of a dream. The Homeric catalogue of ships is exactly on a level with the muster-roll of a regiment, the register of a tax-gatherer, the catalogue of an auctioneer. Nay, some catalogues are far more interesting, and more alive with meaning. 'But him followed fifty black ships!'—'But him follow seventy black ships!' Faugh! We could make a more readable poem out of an Insolvent's ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... shelter. The other two men, occupied with their own thoughts, closed their eyes; but not so Smith. Nothing, to the smallest detail, escaped him. He appraised everything with as perfect an appreciation of its value as an auctioneer. ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... he were in the witness box; but then, as his father was a lawyer, possibly Gusty often experimented on himself, since he meant to either take up the same pursuit in life, or give his magnificent voice a chance to earn him a living in the role of an auctioneer. ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Afloat • George A. Warren
... when he was talking politics to the man behind him?" asked the stranger. "I said two bits," he added complacently, as he watched the auctioneer closely. ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... to be thowt a fooil he should niver start o' showin' off befoor fowk till he knows what he's abaat, an' ther's noan on us knows iverything. Aw remember once go in' to th' sale ov a horse, an' th' auctioneer knew varry little abaat cattle, an' he began praisin' it up as he thowt. "Gentlemen," he said, "will you be kind enough to look at this splendid animal! examine him, gentlemen; look at his head; why, gentlemen, ...
— Yorkshire Ditties, First Series - To Which Is Added The Cream Of Wit And Humour From His Popular Writings • John Hartley
... In case of a division, Richard did not see how he could be divided without being converted into money. Now, as he could have no fore-knowledge as to the place or person into whose hands he might be consigned by the auctioneer, he concluded that he could not venture to risk himself in the hands of the young heirs. Richard began to consider what Slavery was, and his eyes beheld chains, whips, hand-cuffs, auction-blocks, separations and countless sufferings that had partially been overlooked before; he felt the injustice ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... I saw the nut-brown fisher-boats put out.) "Five hundred pounds!" rapped out a voice near by; "Six hundred!" "Seven!" "Eight!" And then a shout: "A thousand pounds!" Oh, how I thrilled to hear! Oh, how the bids went up by leaps, by bounds! And then a silence; then the auctioneer: "It's going! Going! Gone! Three thousand pounds!" Three thousand pounds! A frenzy leapt in me. "That picture's mine," I cried; "I'm David Strong. I painted it, this famished wretch you see; I did it, I, and sold it for ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... paper, flowers, pictures, paste, scissors and watercolors and ask each to make an original valentine. The game of hearts, the auction of hearts and the auction of valentines are old but excellent ways of amusing a company. For the auction of hearts the girls are in a separate room and a clever auctioneer calls off their charms and merits and knocks them down to the highest bidder, who does not know who he has bought until all are sold. A fancy dress party, each girl representing a valentine, is a delightful entertainment for the evening. A small ...
— Breakfasts and Teas - Novel Suggestions for Social Occasions • Paul Pierce
... winches of a winnowing machine. New hats, but old faces. Could his great-great-grandfather have been dug up and set in that barn door, he would have looked just the same, so would the sacks, and the wheat, and the sunshine. At the market town, where the auctioneer's hammer goes tap tap over bullocks and sheep, crowds of men gather together,—farmers, and bailiffs, and shepherds, drovers and labourers—and their clothes are different, but there are the same old weather-beaten faces. Faces that you may see in the ancient illuminated ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... any considerable percentage of motorists use headlights? Yes No 51 52 Does an auctioneer boost prices with earnestness? Yes No 52 53 Is it advisable to use dynamite as a lubricant? Yes No 53 54 Is a person in a frenzy likely to make wild gestures? Yes No 54 55 Should the captain of a yacht consider the weather forecast? ...
— Stanford Achievement Test, Ed. 1922 - Advanced Examination, Form A, for Grades 4-8 • Truman L. Kelley
... it their painful duty to remain awake. At the close of the services the good deacons would probably feel called upon to take the young man out behind the church and give him a little fatherly advice, the burthen of which would be to become an auctioneer or seek a situation as "spouter" for a ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... met him in all places and parties,—at Whitehall with the Melbournes, at the Marquis of Tavistock's, at Robins's the auctioneer's, at Sir Humphrey Davy's, at Sam Rogers's,—in short, in most kinds of company, and always found him ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... had no purpose of awaiting in London the sale of her house. After selecting from among its furniture the objects she wished to transport to her other abode, she left the rest of its contents to be disposed of by the auctioneer and took her departure for the Continent. She was of course accompanied on this journey by her niece, who now had plenty of leisure to measure and weigh and otherwise handle the windfall on which Madame Merle had covertly congratulated her. Isabel thought very often of the fact of her accession ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... been put aside for want of a bidder, a fine cow was put up, and all the usual cajoling and seductive provocations to competition and purchase were held out, but in vain. Every nourish of the bailiff, who acted as auctioneer, was lost, as it were, on empty space, and might as well have been uttered in a desert. Butter-casks, kitchen' vessels, and everything on which the impress could be affixed, was marked with the hated brand of "tithe." No one, however, would bid; and when the bailiffs, ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... present of French wine, left for me, as a taste of 216 hogshead, which are to be put on sale at 20L a hogshead, at Garraway's Coffee-house, in Exchange alley" etc. The sale by candle is not, however, by candlelight, but during the day. At the commencement of the sale, when the auctioneer has read a description of the property, and the conditions on which it is to be disposed of, a piece of candle, usually an inch long, is lighted, and he who is the last bidder at the time the light goes out is ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... the chairs, piled up the forgotten rugs and novels, tidying the deck for the night, but still the embittered musician tramped to and fro under the silent stars. Only from the smoking-room where the amateur auctioneer was still hilariously selling the numbers for a sweepstake, came sounds in discord with the solemnity of sky and sea, and the artist was newly jarred at this vulgar gaiety flung in the face of the spacious and starry mystery of the night. ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... On Mile End Road, from the top of an omnibus which paused at the end of a dingy street lighted by only occasional flares of gas, we saw two huge masses of ill-clad people clamoring around two hucksters' carts. They were bidding their farthings and ha'pennies for a vegetable held up by the auctioneer, which he at last scornfully flung, with a gibe for its cheapness, to the successful bidder. In the momentary pause only one man detached himself from the groups. He had bidden in a cabbage, and when it struck his hand, he instantly sat ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... they are well aware also that their continual indulgences engender disease, which make them very liable to sudden death; or their master may be killed in a duel, or at a horse-race, or in a drunken brawl; then his creditors are active in looking after the estate; and next, the blow of the auctioneer's hammer separates them ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... of Representatives, Mr. Speaker Colfax presided in rather a slap-dash-knock-'em-down-auctioneer style, greatly at variance with the decorous dignity of his predecessors, and he was ever having an eye to the nomination for Vice-President in 1869. The most popular man in the House was unquestionably James G. Blaine, who exercised a fascination ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... that every Negro in the country may contemplate with satisfaction and pride. In the stronghold of slavery, under the shadow of the legalized institution of slavery, within earshot of the slave-auctioneer's hammer, amid distressing circumstances, poverty, and proscription, three unlettered ex-slaves, upon the threshold of the nineteenth century, sowed the seed of education for the Negro race in the District of Columbia, from which an abundant harvest has ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... position as organist and the gentleman who led the orchestra that played during the evening at the hotel was chosen in his stead. At the end of the third month a red flag was seen hanging at the door of Mr. Strout's store and Mr. Beers the auctioneer whose once rotund voice had now become thin and quavering, sold off the remaining stock and the fixtures. Then the curtains were pulled down and the door locked. The next day Mr. and Mrs. Strout and ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... houses, with fronts of carved oak and gables, facing each other across the street. One has figured in both Great Expectations and Edwin Drood, for it is the house of Mr. Pumblechook, the pompous and egregious corn and seedsman, and of Mr. Sapsea, the auctioneer, still more pompous and egregious. The other—Eastgate House, now converted into a museum—is the "Nun's House", where Miss Twinkleton kept school, and had Rosa Bud and Helen Landless ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... fireplace, with a mantelpiece of funereal marble to match the pillars. Mrs. Maitland had refurnished this parlor when she came to the old house as a bride; she banished to the lumber- room, or even to the auctioneer's stand, the heavy, stately mahogany of the early part of the century, and purchased according to the fashion of the day, glittering rosewood, carved and gilded and as costly as could be found. Between the windows at each end of the ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... had been, in the voices of his friends, a note that was new. In the manner of the men who had come to talk with him on matters of business, he had felt a something that he had never felt before. And he had seen the auctioneer—a lifelong friend of his father—standing on the front porch of his boyhood home and had heard him cry the low spoken bids and answer the nodding heads of the buyers in a voice that was hoarse with something ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... rich, held together by closer bonds than those of a Fenian lodge. Balzac resolves that we shall have the whole scene and all the actors distinctly before us. We have a description of a country-house more poetical, but far more detailed, than one in an auctioneer's circular; then we have a photograph of the neighbouring cabaret; then a minute description of its inhabitants, and a detailed statement of their ways and means. The story here makes a feeble start; ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... 'called an auction' shortly after his father's death, he was favoured with quite the usual crowd of would-be buyers. Almost everyone with either money or credit within a radius of twenty miles came into Carrowkeel for the occasion. The presiding auctioneer had done his duty beforehand by advertising old Mr. Conneally's mouldy furniture as 'magnificently upholstered suites,' and his battered editions of the classics as 'a valuable library of handsomely bound books.' It is not likely that anyone was really deceived by these announcements, or ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... platform stood a grim-visaged deputy sheriff, conversing with an auctioneer on whose face the ...
— The High School Boys' Canoe Club • H. Irving Hancock
... a landscape stretching for miles, while listening to the song birds in the neighbouring gardens. It dates from about 1750, and numbers among its successive landlords, Mr. John Roderick, the first auctioneer of that well-known name, Mr. James Clements, and Mr. Coleman, all men of mark. The last-named host, after making many improvements in the premises and renewing the lease, disposed of the hotel to a Limited Liability Company for L15,500. It is at present ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... diplomacy of Bingley. These dismal rites performed, I put my chambers into the hands of a house agent and interviewed a firm of auctioneers with reference to the sale. It was all exceedingly unpleasant. The agent was so anxious to let my chambers, the auctioneer so delighted at the chance of selling my effects, that I felt myself forthwith turned neck and crop out of doors. It was a bright morning in early spring, with a satirical touch of hope in the air. London, no longer to ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... the cart that takes Away my books, my curse, my clog, Blessed the auctioneer who makes ...
— New Collected Rhymes • Andrew Lang
... twelve-line board and the dice-box pay for all. The Gods confound me if I did not lose two millions of sesterces last night. My villa at Tibur, and all the statues that my father the praetor brought from Ephesus, must go to the auctioneer. That is a high price, you will acknowledge, even ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... mystery of his craft; 'why, yes—ha,—ha!—just maybe a little. It's only poison, Sir, deadly, barefaced poison!' he began sardonically, with a grin, and ended with a black glare and a knock on the table, like an auctioneer's 'gone!' ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... ingenious rogue, this Parker of yours, Brewster. His method seems to have been simple but masterly. I have no doubt that either he or a confederate obtained the figure and placed it with the auctioneer, and then he ensured a good price for it by getting us all to bid ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... was partly systematic, partly casual. For local sales every public auctioneer handled slaves along with other property, and in each city there were brokers buying them to sell again or handling them on commission. One of these at New Orleans in 1854 was Thomas Foster who advertised that he would pay the highest prices for sound negroes ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... country people began to leave town and Cheapside was cleared, but, as Chad walked past the old inn, he saw a crowd gathered within and about the wide doors of a livery-stable, and in a circle outside that lapped half the street. The auctioneer was in plain sight above the heads of the crowd, and the horses were led out one by one from the stable. It was evidently a sale of considerable moment, and there were horse-raisers, horse-trainers, jockeys, ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... the group of real estate men, lounging, while they spat tobacco juice, by the red flag at the gate. In the warm air, which was heavy with the scent of a purple catalpa tree on the corner, the drawling voice of the auctioneer could be heard like the loud droning of innumerable bees. A carriage passed down the street in a cloud of dust, and the very dust, as it drifted toward us, was drenched with the ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... his own palaces in Italy: "I wish to fit out the Gauls," said he; "it is a mark of friendship I owe to the brave performed the part Roman people." He himself, at these sales, performed the part of salesman and auctioneer, telling the history of each article to enhance the price. "This belonged to my father, Germanicus; that comes to me from Agrippa; this vase is Egyptian, it was Antony's, Augustus took it at the battle of Actium." The ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... the auctioneer said, "surely you are not going to let this desirable piece of property go for seven fifty? She would be cheap at double the price. I have sold ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... Grace Church, swirled him across old "dead man's curve," and down the Fourteenth Street side of Union Square. Here the shops were smaller, not so overwhelming, and here he was stopped by seeing a red auction flag. Looking in over the heads of the assembled crowd, he saw that the auctioneer was holding up a feather-crowned hat and addressing his audience after the manner of ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... contrived behind one of the useless leaves of the gate, and lighted by a peephole through which that personage watched the comings and goings of seventeen families, for this hive was a "good-paying property," in auctioneer's phrase. ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... say, was a Scotsman—a big, broad-shouldered Sawney—formidable in 'slacks,' as he called his trousers, and terrific in kilts; while Grimes was a native of Swillingford, an ex-schoolmaster and parish clerk, and now an auctioneer, a hatter, a dyer and bleacher, a paper-hanger, to which the wits said when he set up his paper, he added the trade ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... state-line road. We drove to the cotton-yard, unloaded, and received the receipts for the cotton, and put up for the night at a wagon-yard. I spent this night in prayer and supplication that God would save me from the slave-pen and the auctioneer's block; and my prayers were responded to in my protection. The next morning we started for home by what was known as the pigeon-roost route, in order to save toll ...
— Biography of a Slave - Being the Experiences of Rev. Charles Thompson • Charles Thompson
... pounds, however, would be needed for the rent, so I could hardly reckon upon them at all, as far as my immediate wants went. I found in the columns of the Birchespool Post that there was to be a sale of furniture that evening, and I went down to the auctioneer's rooms, accompanied, much against my will, by Captain Whitehall, who was very ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... the auction in the public square, along towards the end of the afternoon, and it strung along, and strung along, and the old man he was on hand and looking his level pisonest, up there longside of the auctioneer, and chipping in a little Scripture now and then, or a little goody-goody saying of some kind, and the duke he was around goo-gooing for sympathy all he knowed how, and just spreading ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... a large room, with a good sprinkling of people, but not crowded except about the table. At the head of this table—full twenty feet long—was the auctioneer's pulpit, and the lots were brought in turn to the other end of the table for ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... of opposites makes the happiest marriage, and perhaps it is on the same principle that men who chum are always so oddly assorted. You shall find a man of letters sharing diggings with an auctioneer, and a medical student pigging with a stockbroker's clerk. Perhaps each thus escapes the temptation to talk "shop" in his hours of leisure, while he supplements his own experiences of life by ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... dear," she had said to dubious Anastasia, when it was brought home. "I did not really mean to buy it, but I had not bought anything the whole morning, and the auctioneer looked so fiercely at me that I felt I must make a bid. Then no one else said anything, so here it is; but I dare say it will serve to smarten the room a little, and ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... "same as if shoo were a cauf; and shoo goes to t' highest bidder." A roar of laughter greeted these words, but nobody had the courage to make a bid. Seeing that purchasers held back, Learoyd after the manner of an auctioneer, proceeded to announce ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman
... impatiently. "Is it an auctioneer's list of goods to be sold that you are hurrying over? Send your companion to me." Another page who stood at the door now entered, and to him the King gave the petition. The second page began by hemming and clearing his throat in such an affected manner that the King jokingly asked him whether ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... in their rambles upon a slave auction where a fine mulatto girl was being pinched and prodded and trotted up and down the room like a horse to show how she moved, that "bidders might satisfy themselves," as the auctioneer said, of the soundness of the article to be sold. John Johnston and John Hanks and Abraham Lincoln saw these sights with the unsophisticated eyes of honest country lads from a free State. In their home circle it seems that slavery was always spoken of with horror. One of them had a tenacious ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... enough. But alas! the outward wreck was a symbol, a result, of inner dissolution. Through the door of the hoarding the two pillars of the front door told a sorry tale. Pasted on either of them was a dingy bill, bearing the sinister imprimatur of an auctioneer, and offering (in capitals of various sizes) Bedroom Suites (Walnut and Mahogany), Turkey, Indian and Wilton Pile Carpets, Two Full-sized Billiard-Tables, a Remington Type-writer, a Double Door (Fire-Proof), and other objects not less useful and delightful. ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... had been set up in the middle of the big room where the auction was being held. Furniture and stuff was jammed all around, even at the back of the platform where the auctioneer stood. He was a thick-set, big-mouthed man wearing a blue ...
— Jerry's Charge Account • Hazel Hutchins Wilson
... of Mr. Roscoe's library, which had consisted of scarce and foreign books, from many of which he had drawn the materials for his Italian histories. It had passed under the hammer of the auctioneer, and was dispersed about the country. The good people of the vicinity thronged liked wreckers to get some part of the noble vessel that had been driven on shore. Did such a scene admit of ludicrous associations, we might imagine something whimsical in this ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... who are expelled from the land cannot be sold. The hammer of the auctioneer cannot be allowed to separate parents from children, or husbands from wives, but poverty, drunkenness, and prostitution produce a similar effect, and in a form even more deplorable. In the five years ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... that only an auctioneer admires all schools of literature. I think it is certain that the way to get most enjoyment from books is to specialise a little. Mr. Pepys, it will be remembered, collected Black Letter Ballads, Penny Merriments, ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... know just how sustaining you can be. Never mind. I'll forgive your slighting remarks about me, and give you the vacant place on the front seat. Now, good people," she put on the business-like expression of an auctioneer, "who bids for the back ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... The scene is probably Cock's in the Piazza at Covent Garden:—"Nothing is so diverting as this kind of sale—the number of those assembled, the diverse passions which animate them, the pictures, the auctioneer himself, his very rostrum, all contribute to the variety of the spectacle. There you see the faithless broker purchasing in secret what he openly depreciates; or—to spread a dangerous snare—pretending to secure with avidity a picture which ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... and had made such diligent use of it that enough was not now left to pay for his prosecution as a thief and forger. In fact, had Balder delayed his return another year, he would have found the enchanted castle in possession of the auctioneer; and as to the fate of its inhabitants, one does not like ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... rates, public parks, sliding scales, excursions to Blackpool, and municipal shindies, to concern themselves with organists as such. In the Five Towns an organist may be a sanitary inspector or an auctioneer on Mondays. In Oldcastle an organist is an organist, recognized as such in the streets. No one ever heard of an organist in the Five Towns being taken up and petted by a couple of old ladies. But this may occur at Oldcastle. It, ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... is just startin' when we get there. The auctioneer is in the judge's stand at the track 'n' the hosses is showed ...
— Blister Jones • John Taintor Foote
... heaven, a diploma for an honourable citizenship. Hide yourself under a bushel quickly, for if your real usefulness were known to the world you would soon be knocked down to the highest bidder by the public auctioneer. Why do men and women like to advertise themselves so much? Is it not but an instinct derived from the ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... asked to see it every time I went any higher. The rascal of an auctioneer kept saying, 'Pass it to the lady.' At last I got it for five pounds eight. Oh, I wouldn't have ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... question cannot be the last. There is always the third reading of a bill. The auctioneer usually cries, 'Third and last time,' not 'Second and last time,' and the banns of approaching marriage are called out three times. So, you see, I have the right to ask you ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... had a claim to some money; but I have not thought much about it, except that I should give you Grote and Macaulay in dark-brown calf, with bevelled boards and red edges, like that edition you saw at the auctioneer's in Bond Street, and have talked about ever since; and a horse, perhaps; and a glass ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... looking closer at the mare's neck, found what I had expected, a great scar. That settled it. I approached the auctioneer and asked permission to speak to the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 19, 1919 • Various
... her invalid than in boring society with the charms of their delightful suite, the most comfortable in the Institute, 'with three rooms more than it had in Villemain's time.' She must have told us this ten times, in the pompous voice of an auctioneer, and in the hearing of a friend living uncomfortably in rooms lately used ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... teeth," said the auctioneer. But she only compressed her mouth more firmly. After trying in vain to coax ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... was sold first: she was knocked down to a planter who resided at some distance in the country. Then I was called upon the stand. While the auctioneer was crying the bids, I saw the man that had purchased my sister getting her into a cart, to take her to his home. I at once asked a slave friend who was standing near the platform, to run and ask the gentleman if he would please to wait till I was sold, in order that I ...
— Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom • William and Ellen Craft
... for German officers, including the Crown Prince) the most distinguished society women in Philadelphia stepped forth smilingly as manikins and displayed on their fair persons the hats, gowns, furs, laces or jewels that they had contributed to the sale. E. T. Stotesbury proved a very efficient auctioneer and large ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... sale, their ages ranging from twelve to sixteen, gorgeously dressed in coloured garments. One of the gentlemen Arabs approached to make a purchase. The slave-dealer vaunted the qualifications of his merchandise, much as an auctioneer does the goods of which he has to dispose. The purchaser felt the poor girls' limbs, looked into their mouths, and trotted them out to see their paces; then, after haggling for some time, walked off with two which he had selected. The others were purchased much in the same ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... to door soliciting for sewing, the knowledge that if he should cease or falter four women might be on the street the next night, keeps him happy, and not even when he was county attorney or in the real estate business nor writing insurance, nor disporting himself as an auctioneer was Mr. Fenn ever in his own mind a person of so much use and consequence. So his Heaven needs no east wind to belly it out. Mr. Fenn's Heaven is full and fat and prosperous—even on two meals a day and ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... exhibited all his powers of mimicry for the amusement of the little Burneys, awed them by shuddering and crouching as if he saw a ghost, scared them by raving like a maniac in St. Lukes', and then at once became an auctioneer, a chimney-sweeper, or an old woman, and made them laugh till the ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... was Messrs. Sharke's agent, was bustling about, and I found him engaged with a fat, pompous little fellow, the auctioneer, from ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 490, Saturday, May 21, 1831 • Various
... now turned on Isabella, as she was led forward by the auctioneer. The appearance of the handsome quadroon caused a deep sensation among the crowd. There she stood, with a skin as fair as most white women, her features as beautifully regular as any of her sex of pure Anglo-Saxon blood, her long black hair done up in the neatest manner, her form tall ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... the bankrupt satisfies the Board of Trade that the remuneration is excessive, the Board may review the same and fix the remuneration. A trustee may not receive any remuneration for services rendered in any other capacity, e.g. as solicitor, auctioneer, &c., beyond that voted to him as trustee; nor may he share his remuneration with the bankrupt, the solicitor or other person employed about the bankruptcy; or receive from any person any gift, or other pecuniary or ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... been described by an English estate agent and auctioneer, with a better foundation of fact than ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... rather a peculiar manner. About sixty head of Arizona horses of the C. A. Bar outfit were being sold. Toward the close of the afternoon they brought out a well-built stocky buckskin of first-rate appearance except that his left flank was ornamented with five different brands. The auctioneer called attention to him. ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... was moving about the sitting-room, which was charmingly furnished in the antique style, and making as many remarks as though he were an auctioneer's clerk with an inventory to prepare and a day to do it in, instead of a cracksman who might be surprised in his ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... him. The chair in which he sat, the poker which he swung slowly to and fro as he bent over his hearth, were not his own. One of his Jewish creditors had a bill of sale on his furniture, and he might come home any day to find the auctioneer's bills plastered against the wall of his house, and the auctioneer's clerk busy with the catalogue of his possessions. If the expected victim came now to buy his practice, the sacrifice would be made too late to serve his interest. The ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... impressively these men advance in a line almost to the centre of the slave market, within two or three yards of the arcade, where the wealthy buyers sit expectant. Then the head auctioneer lifts up his voice, and prays, with downcast eyes and outspread hands. He recites the glory of Allah, the One, who made the heaven above and the earth beneath, the sea and all that is therein; his brethren and the buyers say ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... its muzzle was pressing hard under his cuff. But the Master was too much interested in examining the young hound then being offered for sale to pay any attention to any other animal. In due course, however, the young Wolfhound was sold and led away, and the auctioneer was heard ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... - Potter and Morris, a little acrobat out of a travelling circus, a METIF or half- breed Indian named Jim, two French Canadians - Nelson and Louis (the latter spoke French only); Jacob, a Pennsylvanian auctioneer whose language was a mixture of Dutch, Yankee, and German; and (after we reached Fort Laramie) another Nelson - 'William' as I shall call him - who offered his services gratis if we would allow him to ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... of a valuable gold repeater. He has favoured the world with several literary productions, among which are Memoirs of his own Life, embellished with a view of the author, suspended from (to use the phrase of a late celebrated auctioneer) a hanging wood; and a very elaborate treatise on the Art of Rat-catching. In the advertisement of the latter work, the author engages it will enable the reader to "clear any house of these noxious vermin, however much infested, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... the lot and shipped 72 dozen pair of knee pants to New York, and wrote the auctioneer to send a check for whatever amount ...
— Sam Lambert and the New Way Store - A Book for Clothiers and Their Clerks • Unknown
... long and slowly, and made friends with several: to wit, Tinker Taylor, a decayed church-ironmonger who appeared to have been of a religious turn in earlier years, but was somewhat blasphemous now; also a red-nosed auctioneer; also two Gothic masons like himself, called Uncle Jim and Uncle Joe. There were present, too, some clerks, and a gown- and surplice-maker's assistant; two ladies who sported moral characters of various depths of shade, according to their company, nicknamed "Bower o' ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... my information from a very singular manuscript in the Lansdowne collection, which I think has been mistaken for a boy's ciphering book, of which it has much the appearance, No. 741, fo. 57, as it stands in the auctioneer's catalogue. It appears to be a collection closely written, extracted out of Anthony Wood's papers; and as I have discovered in the manuscript numerous notices not elsewhere preserved, I am inclined to think that the transcriber copied ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... An auctioneer's clerk has been summoned for throwing a bun at a railway buffet waitress. It was a thoughtless thing to do. He ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 31, 1920 • Various
... privately, but decided at last that the best thing to do was to get the four men together in the back room of a certain saloon and have an open auction. When he had his men lined up, he got on a chair, told about the value of the goods for sale, and asked for bids in regular auctioneer style. The highest bidder got the nomination for $5000. Now, that wasn't right at all. These things ought to be always fixed ...
— Plunkitt of Tammany Hall • George Washington Plunkitt
... circle, with Mr Geary the attorney, with Mr Jones the auctioneer, and Mr Powell, the landlord of the Bush Hotel, Mr Evans was much more triumphant. Among them, and indeed, with the gentlemen of Carmarthen generally, he was something of a hero. They did believe it probable that the interloper would be extruded from the property which did not belong to ...
— Cousin Henry • Anthony Trollope
... he could not rise above his rivals in Virgil, Ovid, or the lyric of Horace, he took up the sermoni propiora, and there overshadowed all competitors. In the following lines he describes the hammer of the auctioneer with a mock sublimity which turns ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... year that young Cowperwood entered into his first business venture. Walking along Front Street one day, a street of importing and wholesale establishments, he saw an auctioneer's flag hanging out before a wholesale grocery and from the interior came the auctioneer's voice: "What am I bid for this exceptional lot of Java coffee, twenty-two bags all told, which is now selling in the market for seven ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... King, who was auctioneer by common consent; "here you are! number 24! a fine large statuette by one of the old masters. What am I bid ...
— Marjorie's New Friend • Carolyn Wells
... was extremely handsome. Susy, who had an auctioneer's eye for values, knew to a fraction the worth of those deep convex stones alternating with small emeralds and brilliants. She was glad to own the bracelet, and enchanted with the effect it produced on her slim wrist; yet, even while admiring it, ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... to be said of buying. The dry-goods jobber frequents the auction-room. If you have never seen a large sale of dry-goods at auction, you have missed one of the remarkable incidents of our day. You are not yet aware of how much an auctioneer and two or three hundred jobbers can do and endure in the short space of three hours. You must know that fifty or a hundred thousand dollars' worth of goods may easily change owners in that time. You are not to dream of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... people "bid jealous" as they sometimes "ride jealous" in the hunting-field. Yet, the neophyte, if he strolls by chance into a sale-room, will be surprised at the spectacle. The chamber has the look of a rather seedy "hell." The crowd round the auctioneer's box contains many persons so dingy and Semitic, that at Monte Carlo they would be refused admittance; while, in Germany, they would be persecuted by Herr von Treitschke with Christian ardour. Bidding is languid, and valuable books ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... folks would feel worse if any money got away from 'em at a fair. So Mr. Dishup he says, 'We'll auction of it off,' he says, 'and our honored and beloved friend, Mr. Phillips, will maybe so be kind enough to act as auctioneer.' So Eg, he got up and apologized for bein' chose, and went on to say what a all-'round no-good auctioneer he'd be but how he couldn't say no to the folks of the church where his dear diseased wife had worshiped so long, and then ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... in Sheep's Head, and then we heard of a rush on the Goulburn River. Next day we offered our spare mining plant for sale on the roadside opposite Specimen Hill, placing the tubs, cradles, picks and spades all in a row. Bez was the auctioneer. He called out aloud, and soon gathered a crowd, which he fascinated by his eloquence. The bidding was spirited, and every article was sold, even Bez's own two-man pick, which would break the heart of a Samson to ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... hold of him down on the street some day. He shuts his eyes and just fires away at her while she purrs at him, and it is a sight for the gods. Sue's father died and left her with her invalid mother and not enough money to invite in the auctioneer, but the General took some old accounts of the Doctor's, collected and invested them and made up plenty of money for Sue's grubstake, though he goes around three blocks to get past her. Sue adores him and approaches him from all sides, but has never made a landing yet. Say, you'll like ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... theatre, where miners were dancing with one another, on the floor, to the sound of a fiddle and cracked accordion, while on a stage a thin woman with painted red cheeks was singing and prancing. An auctioneer was selling real estate, from a dry-goods box in the plaza. Stores were open, the streets were thronged, hammering and music and shouting were mingled just as in the night before; and after the Adams party had gone to bed they found it hard work ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... thanking the Lord. and impatiently waited for the sale. No sooner was the cupboard put up, than he called out, "Here, maister, here's six shillin's for un," and he put the money down on the table. "Six shillings bid," said the auctioneer—"six shillings—thank you; seven shillings; any more for that good old cupboard? Seven shillings. Going—going—gone!" And it was knocked ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... picture that every Negro in the country may contemplate with satisfaction and pride. In the stronghold of slavery, under the shadow of the legalized institution of slavery, within earshot of the slave-auctioneer's hammer, amid distressing circumstances, poverty, and proscription, three unlettered ex-slaves, upon the threshold of the nineteenth century, sowed the seed of education for the Negro race in the District of Columbia, ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... her fortunes and her pride no doubt broke Lady Blessington's heart; for within a few months of the last fall of the auctioneer's hammer, she died suddenly in Paris, to the unspeakable grief of d'Orsay, who declared to the Countess's physician, Madden, "She was to me a mother! a dear, dear mother—a true, loving mother to me." Three years later this "paragon of all the perfections" ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... ladies never looked at the poor little king squatting upon his stool. They gathered at once about the chief counselor, who acted as auctioneer. ...
— American Fairy Tales • L. Frank Baum
... division, Richard did not see how he could be divided without being converted into money. Now, as he could have no fore-knowledge as to the place or person into whose hands he might be consigned by the auctioneer, he concluded that he could not venture to risk himself in the hands of the young heirs. Richard began to consider what Slavery was, and his eyes beheld chains, whips, hand-cuffs, auction-blocks, separations and countless ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... Proudie, "what difficulty? The place has been promised to Mr. Quiverful, and of course he must have it. He has made all his arrangements. He has written for a curate for Puddingdale, he has spoken to the auctioneer about selling his farm, horses, and cows, and in all respects considers the place as his own. Of course he ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... being "The Colonel," who was bought, after winning the St. Leger, by George IV. for 4,000 guineas; but the horse broke down after running a dead heat at Ascot in 1831. He only realised 1,150 guineas, and was bought by the auctioneer, Mr. Tattersall. The next highest price given was for "Actaeon," which fetched 920 guineas. The total proceeds of the ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... of the gallery and heard this wonderful man preach a sermon in which he illustrated an auctioneer selling a negro girl at the block. He sat as one entranced. So did the immense audience, held spellbound by the scene so graphically pictured. It was the first interesting sermon he had ever heard. It made a tremendous impression on him, not only in itself, but as a vivid contrast ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... last twelve or fifteen years, had been trying his hand at many trades. And had not come out particularly well at any. A rolling stone gathers no moss. First, he had been clerk to Mr. Carlyle; next, he had been seduced into joining the corps of the Theatre Royal at Lynneborough; then he turned auctioneer; then travelling in the oil and color line; then a parson, the urgent pastor of some new sect; then omnibus driver; then collector of the water rate; and now he was clerk again, not in Mr. Carlyle's office, but in that of Ball & ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... William W. Corcoran, was born in 1798. He began his business career in Georgetown, but for many years he has been a resident of Washington. At twenty he went into business for himself, beginning as an auctioneer. After several years of successful business he was obliged to suspend, during ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... had sailed for Europe, Mr. King started for New Orleans, taking with him his wife and daughter. An auctioneer was found, who said he had sold to a gentleman in Natchez a runaway slave named Bob Bruteman, who strongly resembled the likeness of Gerald. They proceeded to Natchez and had an interview with the purchaser, who recognized a likeness ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... passing along Walnut street, on my way to drop a letter in the Post Office, one morning, about ten o'clock, when the ringing of an auctioneer's bell came suddenly on my ears. Lifting my eyes, I saw the flag of Thomas & Son displayed before me, and read the ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... whatever was told me was told in confidence," said the auctioneer, putting his hand up to screen ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... begin at eleven o'clock, and silverware and china were first to be disposed of. The long drawing-room was full of camp chairs, and the audience had begun to assemble when Rosalind entered and sat down in a corner to wait for her uncle, who was interviewing the auctioneer. Two rows in front of her she saw Miss Betty, with Mrs. Parton ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... Heenan is represented on emerald sward, with primroses and other modest flowers springing up under the heels of his half-boots; while Mr. Sayers is impelled to the administration of his favourite blow, the Auctioneer, by the silent eloquence of a village church. The humble homes of England, with their domestic virtues and honeysuckle porches, urge both heroes to go in and win; and the lark and other singing birds are observable in the upper air, ecstatically carolling their thanks to Heaven ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... was a man who had tried dugong fishing on the Great Barrier Reef; a broken-down advance agent from a stranded theatrical company; a local auctioneer with defective vision, but who had once written a 'poem' for a ladies' journal; a baker's carter who was secretary to the local debating society; and a man named Joss, who had a terrific black eye and who told Denison, sotto voce, ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... after the Great Famine, the Government brought in an Act called the Encumbered Estates Act. A judge was appointed to act as auctioneer. The income of the estate was set out in schedule form, and a man purchased that income by competition in open court. He got with his purchase what was supposed to be the best title then known, commonly called "A Parliamentary title." If he wanted to sell again, that was enough. ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton
... acquired the rules of Latin verse; tried his powers; and perceiving that he could not rise above his rivals in Virgil, Ovid, or the lyric of Horace, he took up the sermoni propiora, and there overshadowed all competitors. In the following lines he describes the hammer of the auctioneer with a mock sublimity ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... All these documents have now, however, entirely disappeared,—how, or at what period since the publication of the work, is unknown; but I find by a newspaper-cutting in my possession (unfortunately without date or auctioneer's name), that a very large collection of ancient documents, filling several boxes, and relating to this church and others in the county, was sold by auction in London some years ago, probably between the years 1825 and 1830. I shall feel obliged if any of your correspondents can inform me in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 79, May 3, 1851 • Various
... undertones, poor dirty worm! his shrewd, elaborate maneuvers for some petty advantage, a drink to the good or such-like deal. There rises before my eyes as I write, young Hopley Dodd, the son of the Wimblehurst auctioneer, the pride of Wimblehurst, its finest flower, with his fur waistcoat and his bulldog pipe, his riding breeches—he had no horse—and his gaiters, as he used to sit, leaning forward and watching the billiard-table from under the brim of his artfully tilted hat. A half-dozen phrases ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... short time back had his pocket picked, at a milling match, of a valuable gold repeater. He has favoured the world with several literary productions, among which are Memoirs of his own Life, embellished with a view of the author, suspended from (to use the phrase of a late celebrated auctioneer) a hanging wood; and a very elaborate treatise on the Art of Rat-catching. In the advertisement of the latter work, the author engages it will enable the reader to "clear any house of these noxious vermin, however much ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... I want him to have a smattering of the law for home use. There's bread in that! As for literature, he's got enough of that in him already; if he begins to kick, I've concluded that I'll make him learn some trade; the barber's, say, or the auctioneer's, or even the lawyer's. That's one thing no one but the devil can do him out of! 'Believe what your daddy says, Primigenius,' I din into his ears every day, 'whenever you learn a thing, it's yours. ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... away. Doors and windows stood wide. The sofa and tea-table where the wisest and best from all parts of the world had held converse were turned out to be examined and bid for. Anybody who chose passed the sacred threshold; the auctioneer's hammer was heard on the terrace; and the hospitable parlor and kitchen were crowded with people swallowing tea in the intervals of their business. One farmer rode six-and-thirty miles that morning to carry home something that had ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... shillings sterling) to redeem such articles as that sum would cover. Accordingly, they duly attended to bid, and Tom became the owner of two lots of Diggs's things:—Lot 1, price one-and-threepence, consisting (as the auctioneer remarked) of a "valuable assortment of old metals," in the shape of a mouse-trap, a cheese-toaster without a handle, and a saucepan: Lot 2, of a villainous dirty table-cloth and green-baize curtain; while East, for one-and-sixpence, purchased a leather paper-case, with a lock but no key, once handsome, ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... deal of money changes hands at the races. Bets are freely offered and taken on the various horses. The pools sell rapidly, and the genial auctioneer finds his post no sinecure. The struggles of the noble animals are watched with the deepest interest. The greatest excitement prevails amongst the elite in the private stands, as well as throughout the common herd below. Every eye is strained ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... it would be impossible to sell this "lot" alone, the Spaniard with the whip ordered George to be released and placed upon the block also, stepping forward at the same time and whispering eagerly in the ear of the auctioneer. ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... manner was supposed to help even the non-Nodin bills through at the "Australasia." At the corner opposite the Shakespeare was the Melbourne Auction Company, where I first met my most worthy old friend, George Sinclair Brodie, so well known for ten years after as the leading Melbourne auctioneer, or rather "broker," for that is nearer the home equivalent. He was the salesman, while a genial and amusing good fellow, John Carey, from Guernsey, was manager. The company had just paid 20 per cent dividend—the ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... which all the rooms are on the ground-floor. An auctioneer's advertisement often runs—"large weatherboard cottage, twelve rooms, etc.," or "double-fronted brick cottage." The cheapness of land caused nearly all suburban houses in Australia to be built ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... churches it is "unite or die!" The mallet of the auctioneer threatens the steeple-house, the young folks are off "golfing" or "hiking," and the gray-beards, lonely and terror-stricken as they see church extinction approaching, favor "a union of forces with some ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees
... gentleman covered all over with orders and ribbons, and hissing into my ear, in a tragic whisper which must have been perfectly audible to everybody in the room, the most astounding details. I simply fled. I like to find out people for myself. But Lady Brandon treats her guests exactly as an auctioneer treats his goods. She either explains them entirely away, or tells one everything about them except what one ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... the wisest thing she could do, but that may be the end of it. He's in an auctioneer's office, and may have a pretty good income ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... and the display was a credit to their talent. I was particularly struck with the really clever carving representing local scenes which the fishermen had done with no other tools than their jack-knives. The auction was the keynote of the evening, due largely to the signal ability of the auctioneer. His methods are effective, but strictly his own. Cakes, made generally in graded layers and liberally coated with different coloured sugar, were the favourites. As he held up the last teetering mountain he "bawled": "What ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... classification show gross ignorance, as in the instance quoted in the Athenum lately. Here we have a crop of blunders: "Title, Commentarii De Bello Gallico in usum Scholarum Liber Tirbius. Author, Mr. C. J. Caesoris. Subject, Religion.'' Still better is the auctioneer's entry of P. V. Maroni's The Opera. Authors, however, are usually so fond of fanciful ear-catching titles, that every excuse must be made for the cataloguer, who mistakes their meaning, and takes them in their literal signification. Who can reprove ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... visited that day, the slave mart at the foot of the fine statue erected in honor of Henry Clay, lived long in Paul's memory. Numbers of slaves were to be sold. The Captain and Paul pushed their way well to the front, so that they stood near the auctioneer. With feelings hard to describe, Paul saw slaves disposed of, singly and in parties. Fathers, mothers, sons and daughters were bid for and sold, and the critical purchasers examined them as if they were prize cattle. While ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... feet, upon his hogshead. "No one wants him," he exclaimed, imitating the accent of an auctioneer, to the great delight of all; "no one wants him? once, twice, three times!" and, turning towards the gibbet with a sign ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... proprietors of a dry-goods store, struck with his good looks and manners, had offered him a situation, if he could make himself more presentable to their fair clients. Harry Flint was gazing half abstractedly, half hopelessly, at the portmanteau without noticing the auctioneer's persuasive challenge. In his abstraction he was not aware that the auctioneer's assistant was also looking at him curiously, and that possibly his dejected and half-clad appearance had excited the attention of one of the cynical bystanders, who was ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... feel after days and nights of prowling for food and shelter. The other two men, occupied with their own thoughts, closed their eyes; but not so Smith. Nothing, to the smallest detail, escaped him. He appraised everything with as perfect an appreciation of its value as an auctioneer. ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... called themselves the Buccaneers. Some of the choice spirits of Chatteris belonged to this cheerful club. Graves, the apothecary (than whom a better fellow never put a pipe in his mouth and smoked it), Smart, the talented and humorous portrait-painter of High Street, Croker, an excellent auctioneer, and the uncompromising Hicks, the able Editor for twenty-three years of the County Chronicle and Chatteris Champion, were amongst the crew of the Buccaneers, whom also Bingley, the manager, liked to join of a Saturday evening, whenever he ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that I am, for even now that my tears have ceased to flow, my grief remains deeply implanted in my heart,)—the property, I say, of Cnaeus Pompeius the Great was submitted to the pitiless, voice of the auctioneer. On that one occasion the state forgot its slavery, and groaned aloud, and though men's minds were enslaved, as everything was kept under by fear, still the groans of the Roman people were free. While all men were waiting to see who would be so impious, ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... him, told me he us'd to come to a House where He Liv'd, and he has also Met him in the Street, Led by Millington, the same who was so Famous an Auctioneer of Books about the time of the Revolution, and Since. This Man was then a Seller of Old Books in Little Britain, and Milton lodg'd at his house. This was 3 or 4 Years before he Dy'd. he then wore ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... I shall begin now, Misto Richmond." And, to Flitter Bill's wonder, the captain stalked out to the stoop, announced his purpose with the voice of an auctioneer, and called for volunteers then and there. There was dead silence for a moment. Then there was a smile here, a chuckle there, an incredulous laugh, and Hence Sturgill, "bully of the Pocket," rose from the wagon-tongue, closed his knife, came slowly forward, and cackled his scorn straight up ...
— Christmas Eve on Lonesome and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.
... daily food, and she excelled in all the dainty handicrafts by which women can make a home attractive. Therefore her own little sanctum had developed like an exquisite flower, and had become, as we have said, an expression of herself. An auctioneer, in dismantling her apartment, would not have found much more to sell than if he had pulled a rose to pieces, but left intact it was as full of beauty and fragrance as the flower itself. And yet her own hands must destroy it, and in a brief time ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... the salesroom when he descried B. Rashkin standing on the outskirts of a little throng that surrounded the rostrum of a popular auctioneer. ...
— Potash & Perlmutter - Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures • Montague Glass
... slab-sided "Sprawleybridge Babe" or the shambling "Baldnob the Titan" have been in front of the small but active and accomplished "Duodecimo Dumps"? Why, where the vaunted "Benicia Boy" would have been after fifty rounds with TOM SAYERS—with his "Auctioneer" in full play. In fact, when a good little 'un meets a bad big 'un, it is very soon a case—with the latter—of "bellows to mend," or "there he goes; ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. March 7, 1891. • Various
... Schuyler de Peyster, to whom I am indebted for many traditions of early New York society, told me that upon one occasion a conversation occurred between Philip Hone and his brother John, a successful auctioneer, in which the latter advocated their adoption of a coat of arms. Philip's response was characteristic of the man: "I will have no arms except those Almighty God has ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... ordinarily wealthy family. The dining-room, library, drawing-rooms, and breakfast-room, were all large and well-arranged. The hall was handsome and spacious, and the bed-rooms were sufficiently numerous to make an auctioneer's mouth water. But the great charm of Ongar Park lay in the grounds immediately round the house, which sloped down from the terrace before the windows to a fast-running stream which was almost hidden—but was not hidden—by ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... called it 'Mr. Foote giving Tea to his Friends,' himself still the sole actor, and changing with Proteus-like celerity from one to the other. Then came his 'Auction of Pictures,' and Sir Thomas de Veil, one of his enemies, the justices, was introduced. Orator Henley and Cock the auctioneer figured also; and year after year the town was enchanted by that which is most gratifying to a polite audience, the finished exhibition of faults and follies. One stern voice was raised in reprobation, that of Samuel Johnson: he, at all events, ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... instance—and they always believe in the first bank that comes among them—they continue to believe, and no effort whatever is necessary to keep the connection. It will be generations in dying out. So with a newspaper, so with an auctioneer—with everything. That which comes first is looked on with suspicion and distrust for a time, people are chary of having anything to do with it; but by-and-by they deal, and, having once dealt, always ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... not the natural observer's method of seeing things, and it is not the natural artist's method of presenting them. If the critics in this case were in the right we should have to acknowledge an auctioneer's catalogue as ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... cried the auctioneer, "here we have a beautiful thoroughbred mare, the favorite mount of Her Royal Highness the Princess, and not a bid do I hear. She's a beauty, gentlemen, sired by the famous Potiphar who won the Epsom Handicap and no end of minor stakes. Take a look ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the sights of New Orleans, negroes chained, maltreated, whipped and scourged; they came in their rambles upon a slave auction where a fine mulatto girl was being pinched and prodded and trotted up and down the room like a horse to show how she moved, that "bidders might satisfy themselves," as the auctioneer said, of the soundness of the article to be sold. John Johnston and John Hanks and Abraham Lincoln saw these sights with the unsophisticated eyes of honest country lads from a free State. In their home circle it seems that slavery was always spoken of with horror. One ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... next day, a few miles off, at Oakfield Lodge. The one-horse car was again put in requisition, and our hostess—the kindest of women—accompanied us to the sale, and by nodding at intervals to the auctioneer, procured all ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... plaintive face in which are set two large, dark eyes that continually seem to soften and develop. That is my picture. And what am I in the world? I will tell you. On certain days of the week I employ myself in editing a trade journal that has to do with haberdashery. On another day I act as auctioneer to a firm which imports and sells cheap Italian statuary; modern, very modern copies of the antique, florid marble vases, and so forth. Some of you who read may have passed such marts in different parts of the city, or even have dropped in and purchased a bust or a tazza for ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... my Shakespeare, and even sacrifice my old quarto Hogarth, before I will part with you. Yes, I will go to the hammer myself, ere I send you to be knocked down in the auctioneer's shambles. I will, my beloved,—old family relic that you are;—till you drop leaf from leaf, and letter from letter, you shall have a snug shelf somewhere, though I have ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... society. Scribe was the only one who would work; "Mais quelle litterature que 'Les Memoires d'un Colonel de Hussards!'" he exclaimed in horror.[*] Another plan for becoming colossally rich of which he talked seriously, was to gain a monopoly of all the arts, and to act as auctioneer to Europe: to buy the Apollo Belvedere, for instance, let all the nations compete for it against each other, and then to sell ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... Eldredge's store, situated at the corners, where the Main Road and the Depot Road—which is also the direct road to South Denboro—join, was the mercantile and social center of Denboro. Simeon Eldredge kept the store, and Simeon was also postmaster, as well as the town constable, undertaker, and auctioneer. If you wanted a spool of thread, a coffin, or the latest bit of gossip, you applied at Eldredge's. The gossip you could be morally certain of getting at once; the thread or the coffin you might have ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Victoria sits upon her throne; Our aristocracy still keep alive, And, on the whole, may still be said to thrive,— Tho' now and then with ducal acres groan The honored tables of the auctioneer. Nathless, our aristocracy is dear, Tho' their estates go cheap; and all must own That they still give society ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... To the Christians of Brantford To the Same Verses Written Immediately after Reading Horace Smith's "Bachelor's Fare!" Stanzas on the Fearful Struggle in Europe, 1854 Lines Written on the Morning, of the Dreadful Fire, March 9, 1854 To the Rev. J. W. and his Bride Stanzas on hearing an Auctioneer quote Scripture Winter's Ravages; An Appeal A Canadian National Song A Call to the Soiree An Address by the Members of the Institute at the Soiree Alcohol's Arraignment and Doom To Mr. James Woodyatt On hearing of ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... left the school financial difficulties beset my uncle's affairs. Aunt Ducie died in the midst of them, and Uncle Gervase did not long survive. Our household gods went under the auctioneer's hammer, our beautiful home became the home of strangers, and I went to live in an obscure quarter of a distant town. My means being exceeding small, I took rooms in a small house in a semi-rural suburb, and from thence began to look for work ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... young negro girl." Remembering that Emma had requested him to purchase a girl as a waiting maid for her, he examined the slave and found her in all respects the kind of house servant he desired. Going up to the auctioneer who had just mounted a bench for the purpose of selling the slave, he enquired where she had come from. The auctioneer responded by handing the doctor a small hand bill setting forth the sale. After reading it he walked up to the slave and commenced ...
— The Trials of the Soldier's Wife - A Tale of the Second American Revolution • Alex St. Clair Abrams
... abandoning the prospect of becoming another Nelson, had joined the police force as a humble constable. But he did not remain one long; and became in turn a Fleet Street publican, the proprietor of a Haymarket night-house, an auctioneer, a picture dealer, a bill discounter (with a side line in usury), and the editor of a Sunday organ. Next, the theatre attracted his energies; and in 1852 he secured a lease of Drury Lane at the moderate rental ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... neither hastened nor hurried the twenty-fourth day of December. I went to the Hotel Bullion, and took my place in Salle No. 4, immediately below the high desk at which the auctioneer Boulouze and the expert Polizzi were to sit. I saw the hall gradually fill with familiar faces. I shook hands with several old booksellers of the quays; but that prudence which any large interest inspires in even the most self-assured caused me to keep silence in regard to the reason of my unaccustomed ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... here the doctor made us all strip—men and women together naked, in the presence of each other while the examination went on. When it was concluded, thirty-eight of us were pronounced sound, and three unsound; certificates were made out and given to the auctioneer to that effect. After dressing ourselves we were all driven into the slave sty directly under the auction block, when the jail warder came and gave to every slave a number, my number was twenty. Here, let me explain, for the better information of the reader, that in the inventory of ...
— Narrative of the Life of J.D. Green, a Runaway Slave, from Kentucky • Jacob D. Green
... priests and churchmen, come to purchase the paraphernalia of the chapel, lest they fall into desecrating hands. Others were business men and agents come to bid upon the realty. A clerical-looking brother had volunteered to wield the hammer, bringing to the office of auctioneer the anomaly of choice diction ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... contained the habitations of a great number of persons in easy circumstances; many of our families of note had their residences there: John Wm. Woolsey, Esq., in 1808, and later on first President of the Quebec Bank; the millionaire auctioneer, Wm. Burns, the god-father to the late George Burns Symes, Esq.; Archbishop Signai—this worthy prelate was born in this street, in a house opposite to La Banque Nationale. Evidences of the luxuriousness of their dwelling rooms are visible to this day, in the panelling of some doors ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... one evening about the notable orations to which he had listened, the great lawyer said that the most eloquent words he had ever heard were "spoken on the auction block by a slave mother." It seemed that she pleaded with the auctioneer and the spectators not to separate her from her children and her husband, and she made these men, who were trafficking in human life, realize the meaning of Christ's words, "Woe unto him that doth offend one of My little ones; it were better ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... you looked at that Odontoglossum Pavo, and if so, what do you think of it?" and he nodded towards a plant which stood in the centre of the little group that was placed on the small table beneath the auctioneer's desk. It bore a spray of the most lovely white flowers. On the top petal (if it is a petal), and also on the lip of each of these rounded flowers was a blotch or spot of which the general effect was similar to the iridescent ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... where he was as quick as ever—no, it was not the last time; the last time was at Douglas Kinnaird's. I have met him in all places and parties—at Whitehall with the Melbournes, at the Marquis of Tavistock's, at Robins's the auctioneer's, at Sir Humphry Davy's, at Sam Rogers's,—in short, in most kinds of company, and always found ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... quite as much as the applause of mature critics. He often exhibited all his powers of mimicry for the amusement of the little Burneys, awed them by shuddering and crouching as if he saw a ghost, scared them by raving like a maniac in Saint Luke's, and then at once became an auctioneer, a chimney-sweeper, or an old woman, and made them laugh till the tears ran down ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... vale, sprinkled with groves, and lakes, and towns, and streams; the mountains afar off, swelling tumultuously heavenward, like waves of the ocean, some incarnadined with radiance, others purpled in shade; all these, to use the language of an auctioneer's advertisement, 'are too tedious to mention, but may be seen on the premises.' I know of but one picture which will give the reader an idea of this etherial spot. It was the view which the angel Michael was polite enough, one summer ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... violation of the company's charter, and the law of the land. "If," said he, "we suffer this bill to pass we shall become the East India Company; the treasury bench will be the buyers, and on this side we shall be the sellers. The senate will become an auction-room, and the speaker an auctioneer." The recommendation of the secret committee was, notwithstanding, adopted, and the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... went to work with the minuteness of an auctioneer taking an inventory, or a sheriff levying an execution. Accordingly he came back full of notes; he had studied Carolus chiefly in respect of movables and ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... strike a chord or two. The child thought himself dreaming. And his mother, where was she? He went toward her room, but the crowd surged at that moment in the same direction. The child was too little to see what attracted them, but he heard the hammer of the auctioneer, and a ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... I wanted to look at this place again. I made them bring me out here. When your man came, just now, to learn if I would see you, I was on the point of sending for you, to ask if you didn't mean to go on. I wanted to judge what I'm letting you have. This sala is very grand," she pursued, like an auctioneer, moving a little, as I guessed, her invisible eyes. "I don't believe you often have lived ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... Wednesday the 13th, after having sold all our goods that were saleable, making our way to the Iron Bark Gully. William enacted the part of auctioneer, which he did in a manner most satisfactory to himself, and amusing to his audience; but the things sold very badly, so many were doing the same. The tents fetched only a few shillings each, and the tools, cradles, ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... said the King, impatiently. "Is it an auctioneer's list of goods to be sold that you are hurrying over? Send your companion to me." Another page who stood at the door now entered, and to him the King gave the petition. The second page began by hemming and clearing ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... speed of one thousandth of a second," announced Uncle Teddy, displaying all the fine points of his treasure like an auctioneer. "Won't I get some great pictures of you folks diving, though!" And he stood looking at the thing in his hands as if he did not quite believe it was real. Then he came to himself with a start and tossed the pack of letters to Katherine ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... daughters should be admitted, but it was very difficult to draw the line, and when drawn, the Misses Pratt were obliged to admit it was rather ridiculous. There was much debate over an application by an auctioneer. He was clearly not a tradesman, but he sold chairs, tables and pigs, and, as Miss Hannah said, used vulgar language in recommending them. However, his wife had money; they lived in a pleasant house in Lewes, and the line went outside him. But when a druggist, with a shop in Bond Street, proposed ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... other visitors. They soon made their appearance. First, two stout old squatters with big laughs and bigger corporations, then Miss Augusta Beecham, next Joe Archer the overseer, and the two other jackeroos. After these appeared a couple of governesses, Mr, Mrs, and Miss Benson, a clergyman, an auctioneer, a young friend of Harold's from Cootamundra, a horse-buyer, a wooll-classer, Miss Sarah Beecham, and then Miss Derrick brought herself and her dress in with great style and airs. She was garbed in a sea-green silk, and had jewellery on ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... same time she wrote to an auctioneer in the Via due Macelli, requesting him to call upon her. The man came immediately. He had little beady eyes, which ranged round the dining-room and seemed to ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... she replied; and she promised to get any information she could for me within a fortnight, by which time I expected to pass that way again. I did so, and Mrs. Smith proved as good as her word. The niece had got the cup from a friend of hers, an auctioneer, and he, not she, had got it at a sale. But he was away from home—she could hear nothing more at present. She gave his address, however, and assurances that he was very good-natured and would gladly put the gentleman ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... is invaluable to Colonel Ross," said she: "he is as good as an auctioneer at telling the value of china. Look at this beautiful heath. Mrs. Ross is very ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... was walking through a side street in one of our large cities, I heard these words ringing out from a room so crowded with people that I could but just see the auctioneer's face and uplifted hammer above ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... flag—not the red flag of the loathed and deadly pestilence that has destroyed so many lives and disfigured so many fair and so many manly countenances, but (in some circumstances) the scarcely less ominous flag of the auctioneer—has been displayed from the handsome and substantial red-brick house in Kensington-Place Gardens, London, in which Thackeray lately lived, and in which he wrote the opening chapters of his last and never-to-be-completed work, which we are all ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... blunder—which will undoubtedly cause much complaint—in waiting until almost the last moment to announce the sale. But few bidders were present, and these had things pretty much their own way, apparently owing to the gross ignorance of the auctioneer. The gem of the gallery, the famous Rembrandt found and purchased in Paris some years ago by Mr. Von Whele, was knocked down for the ridiculous sum of L2,400. The lucky purchaser was Mr. Charles Drummond, of the firm of Lamb and Drummond, ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... said I, 'what sort o' a bill, sir? Is it an auctioneer's, for a roup o' furniture ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... proud and radiant withal. Had it not been for that prediction that her life was to be lengthened, I should have felt anxious. What a marvellous creation a woman is, to be sure! Man and philosopher as I am, my impulse would have been to consign the contents of the garret to the auctioneer or the ash-man, and to retain most of the least-used furniture and upholstery to eke out our new splendor. But Josephine's method was distinctly opposite. She was critical of nearly everything respectable-looking in the ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... son. We must make sure that the description sounds well to the ear. Imagine that I am the auctioneer, thus: ...
— The Brass Bell - or, The Chariot of Death • Eugene Sue
... nearer came the sounds, and the villagers stood at their cottage doors waiting for the musicians to pass. Next to the firing of rockets nothing can be more heart-stirring than the martial sound of the pipes and drums. The big drum was, on this occasion, played most masterly by the auctioneer and clown of the parish church, called Jose Carcunda, or ...
— Tales from the Lands of Nuts and Grapes - Spanish and Portuguese Folklore • Charles Sellers and Others
... the rear. During the morning I made the acquaintance of Colonel Walton, who used to command the well-known Washington Artillery, but he is now chief of artillery to Longstreet's corps d'armee; he is a big man, ci-devant auctioneer in New Orleans, and I understand he pines to return to ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... close to this city, many of these joined the club. Charles Clarke was a prominent member, also W. M. Anderson, C. B. Tenniel, together with many of our young business men, viz., Arthur Keast, the brewer; Lumley Franklin, the auctioneer; S. Farwell, the civil engineer; H. C. Courtney, the barrister; H. Rushton and Joseph Barnett, of one of the banks; Ben Griffin, mine host of the Boomerang; Godfrey Brown, of Janion, Green & Rhodes; W. J. Callingham, of McCutcheon & Callingham, drapers (the latter, by the bye, ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett
... let me see what I've got! There's Anne! I expect if sold on the block, at public auction, say in Alaska, where women are scarce, she would bring some price; but her digestion isn't very good and her heart is quite weak and her hair is falling out. But these things, of course, the auctioneer wouldn't reveal. She would make a fine Duchess, but the market just now is overstocked with Duchesses. And she is a good provider ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... while stationed in Montreal that our hero met Alexander Henry, ex-fur-trader and adventurer and coureur de bois—then a merchant and King's auctioneer—a notable personage and leader in many a wild exploit in the far West, an old though virile man after Isaac's ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... unique collection came under the auctioneer's hammer. Some of the larger guns were sold to the town, and planted at the corners of divers streets; others went off to the iron-foundry; the balance, numbering twelve, were dumped down on a deserted wharf at the foot of Anchor ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... another hundred, and looked as though he was ready to go on. That was the knock-down blow. Shott put his hands in his pockets, leaned back in his chair, and dolefully shook his head in response to all the coaxings and blandishments of the auctioneer. The hammer fell. "Name, please," was called; the lawyer's clerk passed up a slip of paper, and a thunderbolt fell on the company when the auctioneer read out, "Mr. Thomas Hankin." Hankin had bought the farms for L4700. "Cheque for deposit," said the auctioneer. A cheque for L470, ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... of Hungary, and Italians of Whitechapel mingled in the throng. Near East and Far East rubbed shoulders. Pidgin English contested with Yiddish for the ownership of some tawdry article offered by an auctioneer whose nationality defied conjecture, save that always some branch of his ancestry had drawn nourishment from ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... ranchman and auctioneer laughed cheerily. "Once lost, twice get there," he exclaimed, with a quizzical toss of the head, thinking he had said a good thing. "It's a year ago to the very day that I was lost out back"—he jerked a thumb over his shoulder—"and you picked me up ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... he was being sold sat down and kept jeering at the auctioneer, and would not stand up when he bade him, but said joking and laughing, "Would you tell a fish you were selling to stand up?" And Socrates in prison played the philosopher and discoursed with his friends. But Phaeethon,[723] ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... money-lenders; and now even the money-lenders were tired of him. The chair in which he sat, the poker which he swung slowly to and fro as he bent over his hearth, were not his own. One of his Jewish creditors had a bill of sale on his furniture, and he might come home any day to find the auctioneer's bills plastered against the wall of his house, and the auctioneer's clerk busy with the catalogue of his possessions. If the expected victim came now to buy his practice, the sacrifice would be made too late to serve his interest. The men who had lent him the money would ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... able to pay his debts. The mortgage on the farm had been foreclosed. Day of sale had come. The sheriff stood on a box reading the terms of vendue. All payments to be made in six months. The auctioneer took his place. The old man and his wife and the children all cried as the piano, and the chairs, and the pictures, and the carpets, and the bedsteads went at half their worth. When the piano went, it seemed to the old people as if the sheriff were selling all the fingers ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... table and the two chairs that stood near the edge of the bank. To the fore were many white men and several chiefs. And most prominently to the fore, rifle in hand, stood Akoon. Tommy, at El-Soo's request, served as auctioneer, but she made the opening speech and described the goods about to be sold. She was in native costume, in the dress of a chief's daughter, splendid and barbaric, and she stood on a chair, that she might ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... "harmonious," or, worse than all, "descriptive." This last commonly means that the author has done for his readers precisely what they could do for themselves,—that he has made a catalogue of the natural objects to be found in a certain number of acres, which differs from the literary efforts of an auctioneer only in this, that each line begins with a capital and contains the same number of syllables. He counts the number of cabbages in a field, of cows in a pasture, and tells us how many times a squirrel ran up (or down) a given tree in a given time. He informs us that the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... late Hon. Orlando Potter, of New York, with the following touch of patriotic sentiment: "These famous trees are located in the northeast corner of One Hundred and Forty-third street and Convent Avenue; or, on lots fourteen and fifteen," said the auctioneer to the crowd that gathered at the sale. "In order that the old property with the trees may be kept unbroken, should the purchaser desire, we will sell lots 8 to 21 inclusive in one batch! How much am I offered?" "One hundred thousand dollars," quietly responded ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... conclusion of the services Mr. World conducted his friend from the church, and as they were moving again toward the surging crowds they heard the voice of an auctioneer. ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... "what are we now but three footpads?" This, and the insult his sister had received made the place poison to him; and hastened their departure by a day or two. The very next day (Thursday) an affiche on the walls of Albion Villa announced that Mr. Chippenham, auctioneer, would sell, next Wednesday, on the premises, the greater part of the furniture, plate, china, glass, Oriental inlaid boxes and screens, with several superb India shawls, scarfs, and dresses; also a twenty-one years' lease of ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... doesn't want to be thowt a fooil he should niver start o' showin' off befoor fowk till he knows what he's abaat, an' ther's noan on us knows iverything. Aw remember once go in' to th' sale ov a horse, an' th' auctioneer knew varry little abaat cattle, an' he began praisin' it up as he thowt. "Gentlemen," he said, "will you be kind enough to look at this splendid animal! examine him, gentlemen; look at his head; why, gentlemen, it's as big ...
— Yorkshire Ditties, First Series - To Which Is Added The Cream Of Wit And Humour From His Popular Writings • John Hartley
... merchants, bankers, land-speculators, lumbermen, all suffered alike. Some disappeared forever; others survived the shock, but never recovered their former footing. Large amounts of property went under the auctioneer's hammer, "to be sold without limit." Lots of land which cost two or three hundred dollars in '56, were sold at auction in '58 for five or six dollars each. Thousands of people lost their all in these unfortunate land-speculations. ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... was all life and all colour, All confusion and clamour, As dealers showed the paces Of colts, untamed in the traces, To the rap of the auctioneer's hammer. ...
— A Legend of Old Persia and Other Poems • A. B. S. Tennyson
... Your conscience went. Your hope went. Your Bible went. Your heaven went. Your God went. When a sheriff under a writ from the courts sells a man out, the officer generally leaves a few chairs and a bed, and a few cups and knives; but in this awful vendue in which you have been engaged the auctioneer's mallet has come down upon body, mind, and soul: Going! Gone! "Ye ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... the tone, you know. And do you know that is how the preachers get the bronchitis. You never heard of an auctioneer getting the bronchitis, nor the second mate on a steamboat—never. What gives it to the minister is talking solemnly when they don't feel that way, and it has the same influence upon the organs of speech that it would have upon the cords of the calves of your ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... branch of the noble family of Cardigan. But things got somewhat shuffled, through too many hot suppers up to London (being south), and stacks of reds and stacks of blues were drawn in towards the dealer, and so the old mansion fell under the hammer of the auctioneer. What an all-powerful thing is an auctioneer's hammer! And now from the great parlors, and the library, and the "hall," and the guest-chambers echo the rattle of spinning-jennies and the dull booming of whirling pulleys. And above the song of whirring wheels ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... lonely, and gave up the house and property to the Countess Dowager Waldegrave, in whom the fee was vested under Walpole's will. In 1842, George, seventh Earl Waldegrave, to whom Strawberry Hill had descended, ordered the contents to be sold by George Robins, the well-known auctioneer. The sale was advertised to occupy twenty-four days, from April 25th to May 21st. The catalogue was badly compiled, and so much dissatisfaction was expressed at the intention of selling some of the collections ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... Mr. Speaker Colfax presided in rather a slap-dash-knock-'em-down-auctioneer style, greatly at variance with the decorous dignity of his predecessors, and he was ever having an eye to the nomination for Vice-President in 1869. The most popular man in the House was unquestionably James G. Blaine, who exercised a fascination over all, and whose occasional ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... our Constitution. For what is it but a scheme for taxing the colonies in the antechamber of the noble lord and his successors? To settle the quotas and proportions in this House is clearly impossible. You, Sir, may flatter yourself you shall sit a state auctioneer, with your hammer in your hand, and knock down to each colony as it bids. But to settle (on the plan laid down by the noble lord) the true proportional payment for four or five and twenty governments, according to the absolute ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Inn (Duke's Head, in the Market place) and the civil, Norfolk-talking, People. I went to Hunstanton, which is rather dreary: one could see the Country at Sandringham was good. I enquired fruitlessly about those Sandringham Pictures, etc.: even the Auctioneer, whom I found in the Bar of the Inn, could tell nothing of where ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... on the 16th I went to the Rue d'Antin. The voice of the auctioneer could be heard from the outer door. The rooms were crowded with people. There were all the celebrities of the most elegant impropriety, furtively examined by certain great ladies who had again seized the opportunity of the sale in order to be ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... pursued by the President of the United States, when he received a present of lions and Arabian chargers from the Sultan of Muscat. Being forbidden by his sovereign lords and masters, the imperial people, to accept of any gifts from foreign powers, the President sent them to an auctioneer, and the proceeds were deposited in the Treasury. In the same manner, when Captain Claret received his snuff-box and cane, he might have accepted them very kindly, and then sold them off to the highest bidder, perhaps to the donor himself, ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... an only son. Your grandfather was a prosperous farmer and auctioneer. You have distant cousins, Vaughans and Williamses, and some others living at Shrewsbury named Price. I have written to none of them about your return because they never evinced any interest in me or my concerns. Your mother's ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... days later there was a fire sale by one of the merchants, and I got the job of ringing the auction bell. Late in the afternoon the auctioneer held up a brown overcoat. "Here is a fine piece of goods, only slightly damaged," he said. He showed the back of the coat where a hole was burned in it. "How much am ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... and watercolors and ask each to make an original valentine. The game of hearts, the auction of hearts and the auction of valentines are old but excellent ways of amusing a company. For the auction of hearts the girls are in a separate room and a clever auctioneer calls off their charms and merits and knocks them down to the highest bidder, who does not know who he has bought until all are sold. A fancy dress party, each girl representing a valentine, is a delightful entertainment for the evening. A small boy may be used for Cupid and blindfolded. He ...
— Breakfasts and Teas - Novel Suggestions for Social Occasions • Paul Pierce
... remained filled with rage and disappointment; the hag vented her spite on her brother. ''Tis your fault,' said she; 'fool! you have no tongue; you a Chabo, you can't speak'; whereas, within a few hours, he had perhaps talked more than an auctioneer during a three days' sale: but he reserved his words for fitting occasions, and now sat as usual, sullen and ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... faces of nearly all present; and even the auctioneer paused as he was opening his mouth, and with hammer uplifted in the air, prepared to listen. At the beginning of the story, many glanced involuntarily towards the portrait; but later on, all bent their attention solely on the narrator, as his tale ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... worry," mocked Sam. "She'll be discussing with him the future of the Greek drama. Too bad it doesn't happen to be Warfield, or mother could give him tips on the 'Auctioneer.'" ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... said the auctioneer. A terrible word that fell like a blight on the sacred memories of my childhood, and dispelled my earliest illusions, the dearest of all. My entire fortune was comprised in this 'account rendered,' my future lay in a ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... that bid the highest for him. By the time the pony his father had selected was reached, he was fairly trembling with excitement. He was full of apprehension lest somebody else should take him away from them, and when the bidding began, he watched every movement and word of the auctioneer with breathless anxiety, raising quite a laugh at one time, by answering his oft-repeated question "Will anybody give me five? I have thirty—will anybody give me five?" with an eager "I will!" that was easily heard by everybody in the crowd. ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... body at auction, (For before the war I often go to the slave-mart and watch the sale,) I help the auctioneer, the sloven does ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... of it; and it exists—if a little the worse for wear: the bulk is enormous—if the materials be in some sort worm-eaten and crumbling. Truly, he had 'incomparable power.' He was the least capable and the most self-conscious of artists; his observation was that of an inspired and very careful auctioneer; he was a visionary and a fanatic; he was gross, ignorant, morbid of mind, cruel in heart, vexed with a strain of Sadism that makes him on the whole corrupting and ignoble in effect. But he divined and invented prodigiously if he observed and recorded ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... ladies and gentlemen," he cried, with the air of an auctioneer who is about to sell it to the highest bidder, "very fine example from the eighteenth dynasty. Here is the cartouche of Thotmes the Third," he pointed up with his donkey-whip at the rude, but deep, hieroglyphics upon the wall above him. "He live sixteen hundred ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... therefore fair game. I got judgment, but no instalments were paid. I remonstrated over and over again, and was from time to time met with solemn promises, the debtor gaining time by every delay. At last I lost patience, and determined to distrain. Everybody laughed at me. 'Where will you get an auctioneer, and who will bid? they asked. I determined to carry through this one case, if it cost a hundred pounds. I got a good revolver, and succeeded in bringing an auctioneer from a distance. The debtor said he would brain me with a bill-hook if I put my foot on his ground, ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... you came out. JOHNSON. 'Nay, my dear lady, there is no wit in what our friend added; there is only abuse. You may as well say of any man that he will pick a pocket. Besides, the man who is stationed at the door does not pick people's pockets; that is done within, by the auctioneer.' ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... up in the middle of the big room where the auction was being held. Furniture and stuff was jammed all around, even at the back of the platform where the auctioneer stood. He was a thick-set, big-mouthed man wearing a blue and red ...
— Jerry's Charge Account • Hazel Hutchins Wilson
... delicate ladies, the teeming children,—broomsticks they were in comparison to freedom, but,—that was what she had asked, what she had prayed for. God, she said, had let her drop, just as her mother had done. More than ever she grieved, as she crept down the street, that she had never mounted the auctioneer's block. An ownerless free negro! She knew no one whose duty it was to help her; no one knew her to help her. In the whole world (it was all she had asked) there was no white child to call her mammy, no white lackey or gentleman (it was the extent ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... quite extensively. The Moniteur of to-day, and another widely-circulated journal that lies on my table, both contain extracts from those extremely incendiary periodicals, The National Intelligencer, of February 11, and The N.O. Picayune, of February 17. The first gives an auctioneer's advertisement of the sale of "a negro boy of eighteen years, a negro girl aged sixteen, three horses, saddles, bridles, wheelbarrows," &c. Then follows an account of the sale, which reads very much like the description, in the dramatic feuilletons here, of a famous ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... Cumberland, and Simon Rochdale, Baronet, of Hollyhock House, in the county of Cornwall."——By the by, my lord, considering what an expense attends that castle, which is at your own disposal, and that, if the auctioneer don't soon knock it down, the weather will, I wonder what has prevented your lordship's ...
— John Bull - The Englishman's Fireside: A Comedy, in Five Acts • George Colman
... strangely familiar to her—it did not need the signature "Ralph Corbet," to tell her whom the letter came from. For some moments she could not read the words. They expressed a simple enough request, and were addressed to the auctioneer who was to dispose of the rather valuable library of the late Mr. Ness, and whose name had been advertised in connection with the sale, in the Athenaeum, and other similar papers. To him Mr. Corbet wrote, saying that ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... up in a half circle, the auctioneer sitting on a table in the middle, assisted by one or two of the chief town's folk. Outside the circle stood men, women, and children from all surrounding parts of the Island; beyond them again, the patient little ponies waiting for the loads they were to carry off inland. Much of the ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... Brantford To the Same Verses Written Immediately after Reading Horace Smith's "Bachelor's Fare!" Stanzas on the Fearful Struggle in Europe, 1854 Lines Written on the Morning, of the Dreadful Fire, March 9, 1854 To the Rev. J. W. and his Bride Stanzas on hearing an Auctioneer quote Scripture Winter's Ravages; An Appeal A Canadian National Song A Call to the Soiree An Address by the Members of the Institute at the Soiree Alcohol's Arraignment and Doom To Mr. James Woodyatt On hearing of Dr. O'Carr's Death Stanzas suggested by the Railway Accident ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... that if he should cease or falter four women might be on the street the next night, keeps him happy, and not even when he was county attorney or in the real estate business nor writing insurance, nor disporting himself as an auctioneer was Mr. Fenn ever in his own mind a person of so much use and consequence. So his Heaven needs no east wind to belly it out. Mr. Fenn's Heaven is full and fat and prosperous—even on two meals a day ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... passed his boyhood in a wooden house at the corner of John and Dutch Streets which his father bought in 1784. After a common school education, he became, at seventeen years of age, a clerk for an older brother whose business as an auctioneer consisted mainly in selling the cargoes brought to New York by American merchantmen. Two years as a clerk, and then Philip was made a partner. The firm prospered, and by 1820, the future diarist, though only forty years old, had become ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... gentlemen," cried the auctioneer, "here we have a beautiful thoroughbred mare, the favorite mount of Her Royal Highness the Princess, and not a bid do I hear. She's a beauty, gentlemen, sired by the famous Potiphar who won the Epsom Handicap and no end of minor stakes. Take a look ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... their heads together, and resolved to devote their ready cash (some four shillings sterling) to redeem such articles as that sum would cover. Accordingly, they duly attended to bid, and Tom became the owner of two lots of Diggs's things:—Lot 1, price one-and-threepence, consisting (as the auctioneer remarked) of a "valuable assortment of old metals," in the shape of a mouse-trap, a cheese-toaster without a handle, and a saucepan: Lot 2, of a villainous dirty table-cloth and green-baize curtain; while East, for one-and-sixpence, ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... collected her silken skirt, and swished up two flights of stairs and into a bedroom at the back, where she turned on the light. "A very comfortable room," she went on in the voice of a tired and very superior auctioneer. "Just vacated by a Wall Street broker and his wife; very well-connected people. Bed and couch; easy-chairs; running hot and cold water. And for it I'm making a special summer rate, with board, of only twenty-five dollars a week ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... of Rice, Lord Byron's schoolfellow at Harrow Richardson, 'the vainest and luckiest of authors' Riddel, Lady, her masquerade at Bath, at which Lord Byron appeared Ridge, printer Riga, the Greek patriot Roberts, Mr. (editor of the British Review) Robins, George, auctioneer Robinson Crusoe, the first part said to be written by Lord Oxford Rocca, M. de Rochdale estate Rochefoucault, 'always right' Sayings of Rogers, Samuel, esq., his 'Pleasures of Memory' His 'Jacqueline' 'The Tithonus ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... sold them. Klingensmith, too, had put the clothing taken from the bodies, blood-stained, shredded by bullets and knives, into the cellar of the tithing office at Cedar City. Here there had been, a few weeks later, a public auction of the property taken, the Bishop, who presided as auctioneer, facetiously styling it "plunder taken at the siege of Sebastopol." The clothing, however, with the telltale marks upon it, was reserved from the auction and sold privately from the tithing office. Many stout wagons and valuable pieces of equipment had thus been cheaply ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... his nine-hundred-dollar piano are soon parted. The red flag of the auctioneer announces its transfer to a drawing-room frequented by persons capable of enjoying the refined pleasures. Bright and joyous is the scene, about half past nine in the evening, when, by turns, the ladies try over their newest pieces, or else listen with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... well-doing country shopkeeper with a bottle-green frock and brown scratch wig.... I quitted them all (the House of Commons) with the highest contempt.' Of Thomas Campbell, the poet, it is written that 'his talk is small, contemptuous, and shallow; his face has a smirk which would befit a shopman or an auctioneer.' Wordsworth, 'an old, very loquacious, indeed, quite prosing man.' Southey 'the shallowest chin, prominent snubbed Roman nose, small carelined brow, the most vehement pair of faint hazel eyes I have ever seen.' There is a savage caricature of Roebuck, and so Carlyle goes on hanging ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... yellow fever. In addition to these, he had an old file of Sydney papers, and I soon became intimately acquainted with the localities of all the advertising tradesmen there. In particular, the rhetorical flourishes of Stubbs, the real-estate auctioneer, diverted me exceedingly, and I set him down as no other than a pupil of Robins ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... the control of the money into his own hands, and had made such diligent use of it that enough was not now left to pay for his prosecution as a thief and forger. In fact, had Balder delayed his return another year, he would have found the enchanted castle in possession of the auctioneer; and as to the fate of its inhabitants, one does not ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... Sam. "She'll be discussing with him the future of the Greek drama. Too bad it doesn't happen to be Warfield, or mother could give him tips on the 'Auctioneer.'" ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... uniform which in colour and texture was all that the auctioneer claimed, and fingered a small package of gold in his pocket. At that moment some one bid fifty dollars, and Prescott ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... Rome. There are charming women at his parties. But the twelve-line board and the dice-box pay for all. The Gods confound me if I did not lose two millions of sesterces last night. My villa at Tibur, and all the statues that my father the praetor brought from Ephesus, must go to the auctioneer. That is a high price, you will acknowledge, even for Phoenicopters, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... bolstered up with pillows, was driven carefully over the three miles of flinty macadam which led from his old house to his new one, and was put to bed again in a large, half-warmed apartment, fitted up scantily and provisionally with an old chamber-set that had escaped the auctioneer. His own illness and his daughter's marriage had almost brought the furnishing of the new house to a stand-still, while the anxiety of the purchasers of the old place to get their foundations in before the real cold weather had made it impossible for the family to re-remain a single day beyond ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... was an only son. Your grandfather was a prosperous farmer and auctioneer. You have distant cousins, Vaughans and Williamses, and some others living at Shrewsbury named Price. I have written to none of them about your return because they never evinced any interest in me or my concerns. ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... men, occupied with their own thoughts, closed their eyes; but not so Smith. Nothing, to the smallest detail, escaped him. He appraised everything with as perfect an appreciation of its value as an auctioneer. ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... that they are willing to get them at the price of self-respect. Hence come Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Chapman, and play Svengali to our Trilby. These gentlemen use the methods and the tricks of the auctioneer—the blandishments of the bookmaker—the sleek, smooth ways ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... left a widow, in great poverty, and with this one son, who must be educated as well as his father was. Richard is a promising boy, and cannot be satisfied to stand lower in the world than his father stood. His father was an auctioneer. But we are left very poor—poor as mice: and how was I to get him better teaching than the Board Schools here? Well, six months ago, when sadly perplexed, I found out by chance that this small gift of mine might earn me a good income ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... encumbent upon him, as the heir to a marquisate, to obtain what he wanted, let who would have a hankering after the same article. It is in this way that pictures are so well sold at auctions; and Lord Dumbello regarded Miss Grantly as being now subject to the auctioneer's hammer, and conceived that Lord Lufton was bidding against him. There was, therefore, an air of triumph about him as he put his arm round Griselda's waist and whirled her up and down the room in obedience to the ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... pompous ass, auctioneer, and mayor, sit at their wine, expecting a third guest. Mr. Sapsea reads his absurd epitaph for his late wife, who is buried in a "Monument," a vault of some sort in the Cathedral churchyard. To them enter Durdles, a man never sober, yet trusted with the key of the crypt, ...
— The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot • Andrew Lang
... body away, And the watches were sold that Saturday. The Auctioneer said one could seldom buy Such watches, and ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... in boring society with the charms of their delightful suite, the most comfortable in the Institute, 'with three rooms more than it had in Villemain's time.' She must have told us this ten times, in the pompous voice of an auctioneer, and in the hearing of a friend living uncomfortably in rooms lately ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... sent to investigate a claim made by a man who was in the accident at Langrye Station. This man, who was an auctioneer, had not been hurt at all—only a little skin taken off his nose,—but our fop with the check trousers advised him to make a job of it, and said that he himself and his friend had intended to make a claim, only they had another and more important game in hand, which rendered it advisable for ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... that stuff is auctioned off, and they got to collar every last bottle of it, no matter what the cost. I have to lay down like a pup on the next bond drive, but this is my only hope. For the Lord's sake, don't you go there and start bidding things up, no matter who she gets for auctioneer! Don't you bid—even if ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... pipeclay bottom. I found some gold also in Sheep's Head, and then we heard of a rush on the Goulburn River. Next day we offered our spare mining plant for sale on the roadside opposite Specimen Hill, placing the tubs, cradles, picks and spades all in a row. Bez was the auctioneer. He called out aloud, and soon gathered a crowd, which he fascinated by his eloquence. The bidding was spirited, and every article was sold, even Bez's own two-man pick, which would break the heart of ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... and had seen him at work—a burly, bustling, vulgar man who took possession of the pulpit as if it were an auctioneer's block, and pursued the task of exciting liberality in the bosoms of the congregation by alternating prayer, anecdote, song, and cheap buffoonery in a manner truly sickening. Would it not be preferable, he feebly suggested, to raise the ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... thing she could do, but that may be the end of it. He's in an auctioneer's office, and may have a pretty good income ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... Maybud, and I would fain not die "pop." MAR. You are Rose Maybud? ROSE. Yes, sweet Rose Maybud! MAR. Strange! They told me she was beautiful! And he loves you! No, no! If I thought that, I would treat you as the auctioneer and land-agent treated the lady-bird—I would rend you asunder! ROSE. Nay, be pacified, for behold I am pledged to another, and Lo, we are to be wedded this very day! MAR. Swear me that! Come to a Commissioner ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... 41: This gentleman's library, not so remarkable for the black letter as for whimsical publications, was sold by auction, by Samuel Paterson, [the earliest sale in which I find this well known book-auctioneer engaged] in June, 1759, and the three ensuing evenings. The title of the Sale Catalogue is ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... the sounds, and the villagers stood at their cottage doors waiting for the musicians to pass. Next to the firing of rockets nothing can be more heart-stirring than the martial sound of the pipes and drums. The big drum was, on this occasion, played most masterly by the auctioneer and clown of the parish church, called Jose ...
— Tales from the Lands of Nuts and Grapes - Spanish and Portuguese Folklore • Charles Sellers and Others
... made us all strip—men and women together naked, in the presence of each other while the examination went on. When it was concluded, thirty-eight of us were pronounced sound, and three unsound; certificates were made out and given to the auctioneer to that effect. After dressing ourselves we were all driven into the slave sty directly under the auction block, when the jail warder came and gave to every slave a number, my number was twenty. Here, let me ...
— Narrative of the Life of J.D. Green, a Runaway Slave, from Kentucky • Jacob D. Green
... King, impatiently. "Is it an auctioneer's list of goods to be sold that you are hurrying over? Send your companion to me." Another page who stood at the door now entered, and to him the King gave the petition. The second page began by hemming and clearing his throat ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... the bystanders. The editions were chiefly American, made to sell, and thus exceedingly cheap. History and novels appeared to be the literature in demand; and Walter Scott, Byron, and Bulwer, the names most familiar in the verbal catalogue galloped over by the "learned gentleman," as our auctioneer advertisements have it. ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... and she excelled in all the dainty handicrafts by which women can make a home attractive. Therefore her own little sanctum had developed like an exquisite flower, and had become, as we have said, an expression of herself. An auctioneer, in dismantling her apartment, would not have found much more to sell than if he had pulled a rose to pieces, but left intact it was as full of beauty and fragrance as the flower itself. And yet her own hands must destroy it, and in a brief time she must exchange ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... Fourteenth Street side of Union Square. Here the shops were smaller, not so overwhelming, and here he was stopped by seeing a red auction flag. Looking in over the heads of the assembled crowd, he saw that the auctioneer was holding up a feather-crowned hat and addressing his audience after the manner of ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... of Virginia. Conversing one evening about the notable orations to which he had listened, the great lawyer said that the most eloquent words he had ever heard were "spoken on the auction block by a slave mother." It seemed that she pleaded with the auctioneer and the spectators not to separate her from her children and her husband, and she made these men, who were trafficking in human life, realize the meaning of Christ's words, "Woe unto him that doth offend one of My little ones; ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... magistrate, slighting the initials and laying most emphasis on the name. No one answered; but two persons in the corner, a father and son, exchanged significant glances and looked very acute and wise. The Squire raised his voice, and let it fall like an auctioneer's hammer on ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... careless apothecary's 'prentice, to make the same confusion of ingredients, especially in the more mischievous way. I cannot leave the "Annus Mirabilis" without giving an example of this. Describing the Dutch prizes, rather like an auctioneer than ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... all of it!' said the auctioneer. A terrible word that fell like a blight on the sacred memories of my childhood, and dispelled my earliest illusions, the dearest of all. My entire fortune was comprised in this 'account rendered,' my future lay in a linen bag with eleven hundred and twelve ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... Serbs, Roumanians, Jews of Hungary, and Italians of Whitechapel mingled in the throng. Near East and Far East rubbed shoulders. Pidgin English contested with Yiddish for the ownership of some tawdry article offered by an auctioneer whose nationality defied conjecture, save that always some branch of his ancestry had drawn nourishment from ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... three ways in which the charter of a corporation may be regarded. In the first place, it may be thought of simply as a license terminable at will by the State, like a liquor-seller's license or an auctioneer's license, but affording the incorporators, so long as it remains in force, the privileges and advantages of doing business in the form of a corporation. Nowadays, indeed, when corporate charters are usually issued to all legally qualified applicants by an administrative officer who acts ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... her, nor did that, nor alas! the other! Each and every one were eager for the boy. The auctioneer's instructions had been to sell the two together, if possible, if not, at all events to sell the boy, as he would command a good price, and money ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... unmistakable manifestations of popular disfavour. A large bullock-team hauling a waggon load of bales blundered slowly along the road, the weary cattle swinging from side to side under the lash of the bullocky, who yelled hoarse profanity with the volubility of an auctioneer and the vocabulary of a Yankee skipper unchecked by authority. A little further on another team, drawn up before a hotel, lay sprawling, half buried, the patient bullocks twisted into painful angles by reason of their yokes, quietly chewing the cud. Riders and ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... leader asked for bids privately, but decided at last that the best thing to do was to get the four men together in the back room of a certain saloon and have an open auction. When he had his men lined up, he got on a chair, told about the value of the goods for sale, and asked for bids in regular auctioneer style. The highest bidder got the nomination for $5000. Now, that wasn't right at all. These things ought to be always fixed up ...
— Plunkitt of Tammany Hall • George Washington Plunkitt
... changes hands at the races. Bets are freely offered and taken on the various horses. The pools sell rapidly, and the genial auctioneer finds his post no sinecure. The struggles of the noble animals are watched with the deepest interest. The greatest excitement prevails amongst the elite in the private stands, as well as throughout the common herd below. Every eye is strained to watch the swift coursers as they whirl ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... a palisade of tables made in the best drawing-room; and on the capital, french-polished, extending, telescopic range of Spanish mahogany dining-tables with turned legs, the pulpit of the Auctioneer is erected; and the herds of shabby vampires, Jew and Christian, the strangers fluffy and snuffy, and the stout men with the napless hats, congregate about it and sit upon everything within reach, mantel-pieces included, and begin to ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... rules of the school that no tradesmen's daughters should be admitted, but it was very difficult to draw the line, and when drawn, the Misses Pratt were obliged to admit it was rather ridiculous. There was much debate over an application by an auctioneer. He was clearly not a tradesman, but he sold chairs, tables and pigs, and, as Miss Hannah said, used vulgar language in recommending them. However, his wife had money; they lived in a pleasant house in Lewes, and the line ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... back to the stand and by and by the auctioneer praised the flock. When he stopped, there was silence for a few moments ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... why I did so. I knew it contained but a hundred dollars. The "sportsmen" had reduced it in bulk. When I had finished counting it, I could not help smiling at the absurdity of the thing. "A hundred dollars for the quadroon! Likely—good housekeeper, etcetera! a hundred dollars bid!" The auctioneer would not be ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... pincushions and sofa pillows and embroidered slippers were sold, Emil precipitated a panic by taking out one of his turquoise shirt studs, which every one had been admiring, and handing it to the auctioneer. All the French girls clamored for it, and their sweethearts bid against each other recklessly. Marie wanted it, too, and she kept making signals to Frank, which he took a sour pleasure in disregarding. He didn't see the use of making a fuss over a fellow just because he ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... ever-flying banner of the metropolis, the smoke of the city's chimneys, if you prefer plain language. At a first inspection of the house, Lady Dunstane did not like it, and it was advertized to be let, and the auctioneer proclaimed it in his dialect. Her taste was delicate; she had the sensitiveness of an invalid: twice she read the stalking advertizement of the attractions of Copsley, and hearing Diana call it 'the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... "Australasia." At the corner opposite the Shakespeare was the Melbourne Auction Company, where I first met my most worthy old friend, George Sinclair Brodie, so well known for ten years after as the leading Melbourne auctioneer, or rather "broker," for that is nearer the home equivalent. He was the salesman, while a genial and amusing good fellow, John Carey, from Guernsey, was manager. The company had just paid 20 per cent dividend—the first as well as the last in that way. In the jolly days up to that time every ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... would be impossible to sell this "lot" alone, the Spaniard with the whip ordered George to be released and placed upon the block also, stepping forward at the same time and whispering eagerly in the ear of the auctioneer. ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... herrings, but really much more). At nine a bell rings and the various auctioneers commence operations. A crowd is formed, and in a very few minutes a lot is sold off to traders who are well known, and who pay at the end of the week. The auctioneer then proceeds to the next group, which is disposed of in a similar way. Other auctioneers in various parts of the enormous shed erected for their accommodation do the same, and then, as more boats arrive, other cargoes are sold, the sailors bringing a hundred ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... you can, an institution employing all these agencies, every one of them fully equipped and manned, and with streams of money flowing in to their support; no barren appeals from the pulpit for funds to pay expenses, and no auctioneer's hammer profaning the ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... another in his place. Thereupon, not discouraged, he turned his hand, with national facility, to something else—following, successively, the business of a small grocer, of a tavern keeper, and of an auctioneer. Somehow or other, however, ill luck still followed him; and, finally, he took to distributing the village newspaper, and sticking up handbills. This gave him a taste for politics, and having acquired, ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... falling into the hands of some heirs that I had been willed to." In case of a division, Richard did not see how he could be divided without being converted into money. Now, as he could have no fore-knowledge as to the place or person into whose hands he might be consigned by the auctioneer, he concluded that he could not venture to risk himself in the hands of the young heirs. Richard began to consider what Slavery was, and his eyes beheld chains, whips, hand-cuffs, auction-blocks, separations and countless sufferings that had partially ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... wishes at the horse-races; and most of all he imposed upon the ones especially selected by lot for this purpose, for he had ordered that two praetors, just as it might happen, should be allotted to take charge of the gladiatorial games. He himself sat on the auctioneer's platform and kept outbidding them. Many also came from outside to bid against them, particularly because he allowed such as wished to employ a greater number of gladiators than the law permitted and because he often had recourse to them himself. ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... the grave ought the rich and the poor to meet on a level, before Him who regards not the outward estate of his creatures. But modern Christians have contrived to evade the rebuke of the apostle by the cunning device of introducing the noisy auctioneer, and under a show of fairness and equality, 'the man in goodly apparel and having a gold ring' is assigned the highest seat; and albeit a skeptic, by the weight of his purse crowds the humble worshippers to the wall and into the corners of their ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... mud-wooden Caesters and Chesters had become steepled, tile-roofed, compact towns. Sheffield had taken to the manufacture of Sheffield whittles. Worstead could from wool spin yarn, and knit or weave the same into stockings or breeches for men. England had property valuable to the auctioneer; but the accumulate manufacturing, commercial, economic skill which lay impalpably warehoused in English hands and heads, ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... great gathering of the most celebrated physicians of the day and his books and records fetched fabulous prices. But one special tome, ponderous, silver-clasped and locked, entitled: "Macrobiotic, The True and Complete Secret of Long, Healthy Life," was the cynosure of every avaricious eye. The auctioneer shrewdly reserved it until the last. Amidst a scene of unparalleled excitement and competition the Great Book was at length knocked down to a famous London physician for no less a sum than seven thousand Gulden. When ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... before the house of an old sea captain who had recently died and whose furniture was for sale. Just at that moment a parrot was at auction. He had green feathers and a blue head and was watching everybody with a displeased look. "Three francs!" cried the auctioneer. "A bird that can talk like ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... invaluable to Colonel Ross," said she: "he is as good as an auctioneer at telling the value of china. Look at this beautiful heath. Mrs. Ross is very proud ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... was a fire sale by one of the merchants, and I got the job of ringing the auction bell. Late in the afternoon the auctioneer held up a brown overcoat. "Here is a fine piece of goods, only slightly damaged," he said. He showed the back of the coat where a hole was burned in it. ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... us than this old Westwood, the acquaintance of scarce more weeks. Under his roof now ought I to take my rest, but that back-looking ambition tells me I might yet be a Londoner! Well, if we ever do move, we have encumbrances the less to impede us; all our furniture has faded under the auctioneer's hammer, going for nothing, like the tarnished frippery of the prodigal, and we have only a spoon or two left to bless us. Clothed we came into Enfield, and naked we must go out of it. I would live in London shirtless, bookless. Henry Crabb is at Rome; advices to that effect have reached Bury. ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... to tell of a lady who was letting her house, and, after instructing the auctioneer as to the value of her chairs, furniture and china, had left him in the dining room where the side-board had several bottles of wine and whiskey on it. She waited for a long time hoping he would return to show her the inventory, but as he did not appear ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... Sharke's agent, was bustling about, and I found him engaged with a fat, pompous little fellow, the auctioneer, from ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 490, Saturday, May 21, 1831 • Various
... ample for the requirements of any ordinarily wealthy family. The dining-room, library, drawing-rooms, and breakfast-room, were all large and well-arranged. The hall was handsome and spacious, and the bed-rooms were sufficiently numerous to make an auctioneer's mouth water. But the great charm of Ongar Park lay in the grounds immediately round the house, which sloped down from the terrace before the windows to a fast-running stream which was almost hidden—but was not hidden—by the shrubs on its bank. Though the domain itself was ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... Greenwood, and Longstreet's corps had to bring up the rear. During the morning I made the acquaintance of Colonel Walton, who used to command the well-known Washington Artillery, but he is now chief of artillery to Longstreet's corps d'armee; he is a big man, ci-devant auctioneer in New Orleans, and I understand he pines ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... of the readiness with which, in these railroad days, a manufacture can be transplanted, was exhibited at Tewkesbury four years ago. The once- fashionable theatre of that decayed town was being sold by auction; it hung on the auctioneer's hammer at so trifling a sum that one of the new made M.P.'s of the borough bought it. Having bought it, for want of some other use he determined to turn it into a silk mill. In a very short space of time the needful machinery was obtained from Macclesfield, with an overseer. While the machinery ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... Martin. It was one of the warm days of this jubilee summer, which appears only once in fifty years—the plants were disposed in little clumps about the lawn: the company walked to bid from one to the other, and the auctioneer knocked down the lots on the orange tubs. Within three doors was an auction of china. You did not imagine that we were ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... death his unique collection came under the auctioneer's hammer. Some of the larger guns were sold to the town, and planted at the corners of divers streets; others went off to the iron-foundry; the balance, numbering twelve, were dumped down on a deserted wharf at the foot of Anchor Lane, where, summer after summer, they ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... stentorian voice, who was roaring out his opinions to Cockburn, Fred continued, was "Fog-horn" Cranch, the auctioneer. His room was next to Waller's. His weaknesses were gay-colored waistcoats and astounding cravats. He varied these portions of his dress according to wind, weather, and sales of the day—selecting blue for sunshiny mornings, black for rainy ones, green for pictures, red for household furniture, ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... at its door could view a landscape stretching for miles, while listening to the song birds in the neighbouring gardens. It dates from about 1750, and numbers among its successive landlords, Mr. John Roderick, the first auctioneer of that well-known name, Mr. James Clements, and Mr. Coleman, all men of mark. The last-named host, after making many improvements in the premises and renewing the lease, disposed of the hotel to a Limited Liability Company for L15,500. It is at present one of the ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... vero," said a very great Lord Mayor, "e ben traviata." His lordship's linguistic slip served him right. Latin is fair play, though some of us are in the condition of the auctioneer in The Mill on the Floss, who had brought away with him from the Great Mudport Free School "a sense of understanding Latin generally, though his comprehension of any particular Latin was not ready." ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... artist appears to have entered by way of passing the time. The horse and trap were there, but no trace of poor Lane; and on search being made, his body was found lying lifeless at the foot of the auctioneer's stand. He appears to have wandered into the betting-room, and by some unexplained means or other fallen backwards through an insufficiently protected skylight. The clever head was battered so completely out of recognition that he was only identified by ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... gentlemen," he cried, with the air of an auctioneer who is about to sell it to the highest bidder, "very fine example from the eighteenth dynasty. Here is the cartouche of Thotmes the Third," he pointed up with his donkey-whip at the rude, but deep, hieroglyphics upon the wall above him. "He live sixteen hundred years before Christ, and ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... was advertised in the Sydney Gazette for sale by auction, Mr. Lord, the auctioneer, setting forth that he ...
— Foster's Letter Of Marque - A Tale Of Old Sydney - 1901 • Louis Becke
... I was walking through a side street in one of our large cities, I heard these words ringing out from a room so crowded with people that I could but just see the auctioneer's face and uplifted hammer above the heads of ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... regarded in England as a public event, and all the journals give an account of it with exact care, assembling from every county and even from foreign countries. The sale begins about two o'clock. A circle in formed with ropes in a small field near the mansion, where the rams are introduced, and an auctioneer announces the biddings, which are frequently very spirited. The rams to be let are exposed around the field from the first of the morning, and a ticket at the head of each pen indicates the weight of the fleece of the animal it contains. Every one takes his notes, chooses the animal ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... complications in its train, commenced with a very small incident. A certain Bezeidenhout, having refused to pay his taxes, had, by order, some of his goods seized and put up to auction. This was the signal for the malcontents to attack the auctioneer and rescue the goods. So great became the uproar and confusion, the women aiding and abetting the men in their disobedience of the law, that military assistance was summoned. Major Thornhill, with a few companies of ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... a pound,' said the auctioneer, 'Only a pound; and I'm standing here Selling this animal, gain or loss. Only a pound for the drover's horse; One of the sort that was never afraid, One of the boys of the Old Brigade; Thoroughly honest and game, I'll swear, Only a little the worse for wear; ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... mildly but firmly, "if you are going to tell the story about your mother and the auctioneer I shall leave the room. It will be the twenty-fifth time I have heard it already, and human patience has a limit. One ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... join his society. Scribe was the only one who would work; "Mais quelle litterature que 'Les Memoires d'un Colonel de Hussards!'" he exclaimed in horror.[*] Another plan for becoming colossally rich of which he talked seriously, was to gain a monopoly of all the arts, and to act as auctioneer to Europe: to buy the Apollo Belvedere, for instance, let all the nations compete for it against each other, and then to sell ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... your paint shop, James, my son, call in the auctioneer, stick up a bill 'TO LET.' Let us return at once to the land of our birth. No such attractions exist in this turkey-trodden, maccaroni-eating, picture-peddling, stone-cutting, mass-singing land of ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... gave the student a glance, one of those glances in which a great soul can mingle dignity and gratitude. It was like balm to the law student, who was still smarting under the Duchess' insolent scrutiny; she had looked at him as an auctioneer might look at some article to ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... end of the tent a rough platform had been erected, on which stood a row of cane seats. In the body of the hall, the benches were formed of boards, laid from one upturned keg or tub to another. The chair was taken by a local auctioneer, a cadaverous-looking man, with never a twinkle in his eye, who, in a lengthy discourse and with the single monotonous gesture of beating the palm of one hand with the back of the other, strove to bring home to his audience ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... I should like Tom to be a bit of a scholard. It 'ud be a help to me wi' these lawsuits, and arbitrations, and things. I wouldn't make a downright lawyer o' the lad—I should be sorry for him to be a raskill—but a sort of engineer, or a surveyor, or an auctioneer and vallyer, like Riley, or one o' them smartish businesses as are all profits and no outlay, only for a big watch-chain and a high stool. They're pretty nigh all one, and they're not far off being even wi' the law, I believe; for Riley looks Lawyer Wakem ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... resembling an auctioneer's box, erected on the hearth-rug, presided, with extraordinary gravity, hammer in hand, robed in a bachelor's gown and hood. Beneath him the room seethed with the company, male and female, all in an excellent humor, and quite tolerable prices were obtained. No public explanations ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... sale of the property and effects of the Widow Hurley. I attended the sale, hitched my horse in the barn lot and was walking across the garden at the back of the house toward an open space, where the crowd was gathered waiting for the auctioneer to open the sale. As I walked I came upon Mrs. Hurley, crying. "Good morning, Mrs. Hurley," I said, "I am sorry to see you in ...
— The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself • Cole Younger
... very exciting to be present this last evening of the fair, for everyone was anxious to make the most of it, and Edna thought it great fun to watch the auctioneer who was selling off some of the larger articles. She was intensely interested when Mr. Martin began bidding on a set of books, and was quite as triumphant as he was when they were knocked down ...
— A Dear Little Girl • Amy E. Blanchard
... gentlemen: Mrs. Westangle has chosen me, because a real- estate broker is sometimes an auctioneer, and may be supposed to have the gift of oratory, to make known the conditions on which you may interview the ghosts which you are going to see. Anybody may do it who will comply with the conditions. In the first place, you have got to be serious, and to think up something that you would ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... in English: "Now, ladies, as I should begin if I were a politician, or an auctioneer; now, ladies, the time for confession has arrived; I can no longer conceal from you my burglarious scheme. In the next turn that we shall make to the right, the park of the P—— manoir will disclose itself. But, between us and that Park, there is ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... me in, closed the door, and as I remained standing before him, horror-struck, he kissed me, put his arm round my waist and made me go back into the drawing-room, which had remained open. Then he began to look at everything, like an auctioneer, and continued: 'By Jove, it is very nice in your rooms, very well. You must be very down on your luck just now, to do ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... shops, four real estate offices, a furniture store, a drugstore, a jewellery store, a steam laundry, a flour and feed store, a shoe-shop, a bakery, and a bookshop. Three barbers had hung out their signs, and so had two doctors, a photographer, a lawyer, a dentist, and an auctioneer. There were ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... to begin," Asher said, and Harding sat down angry with Asher and interested in the auctioneer's face, created, Harding thought, for the job... "looking exactly like a Roman bust. Lofty brow, tight lips, vigilant eyes, voice like a bell.... That damned fellow Asher! What the hell did ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... property of Cnaeus Pompeius Magnus—(miserable that I am, for even now that my tears have ceased to flow, my grief remains deeply implanted in my heart,)—the property, I say, of Cnaeus Pompeius the Great was submitted to the pitiless, voice of the auctioneer. On that one occasion the state forgot its slavery, and groaned aloud, and though men's minds were enslaved, as everything was kept under by fear, still the groans of the Roman people were free. While all men were waiting to see who would be so impious, who would be so mad, who ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... harmony, builders seem to be trying to “go” each other “one story better”; if they can belittle a neighbor in the process it is clear gain, and so much advertisement. Certain blocks on lower Broadway are gems in this way! Any one who has glanced at an auctioneer’s shelves when a “job lot” of books is being sold, will doubtless have noticed their resemblance to the sidewalks of our down town streets. Dainty little duodecimo buildings are squeezed in between towering in-folios, and richly ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... shore ain't no nigger-lovin' reepublican. At the same time, I ain't no cheap hoss-thief of a democrat, neither, even if I does come from Texas. Why, Doc, takin' jedge an' opposin' counsel an' the clerk who records the decree, on down to that ornery auctioneer of a sheriff who sells up my stock at public vandoo for costs an' al'mony the time my Laredo wife grabs off her divorce, every stick-up among 'em's a democrat. An' while I don't know nothin' about pol'tics, an' never aims to, you can go the limit on it I ain't nothin' them bandits ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... five or six female slaves for sale, their ages ranging from twelve to sixteen, gorgeously dressed in coloured garments. One of the gentlemen Arabs approached to make a purchase. The slave-dealer vaunted the qualifications of his merchandise, much as an auctioneer does the goods of which he has to dispose. The purchaser felt the poor girls' limbs, looked into their mouths, and trotted them out to see their paces; then, after haggling for some time, walked off with two which he had selected. The others were purchased much in the ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... and silverware and china were first to be disposed of. The long drawing-room was full of camp chairs, and the audience had begun to assemble when Rosalind entered and sat down in a corner to wait for her uncle, who was interviewing the auctioneer. Two rows in front of her she saw Miss Betty, with Mrs. ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... Mr. ——, an inhabitant of Lewisham, in Kent, where he possessed a farm of considerable extent, and followed the business of an auctioneer, and was greatly respected in his neighbourhood. That night he dropped down in the house alluded to, when the people, supposing him dead, immediately gave the alarm, and the body was conveyed to the Lord ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... As the auctioneer—a spruce importation from Newbern—mounted the bench, a splendid carriage, drawn by two magnificent grays, and driven by a darky in livery, made its way through the crowd, and drew up opposite the stand. In it were ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... bronzes go to the auctioneer if that is the case. I have no less than a hundred sestertia upon Tetraides. Ha, ha! see how he rallies! That was a home stroke: he has cut open Lydon's shoulder. ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... and went to work with the minuteness of an auctioneer taking an inventory, or a sheriff levying an execution. Accordingly he came back full of notes; he had studied Carolus chiefly in respect ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... like most of his brother artists in all but his art. He hated school and at twelve years of age was taken from it. His father wanted him to become a warehouse merchant like himself, and he began life as clerk or apprentice to an auctioneer. He next went into the employment of some calico-printers of Manchester. The designing of calicoes can hardly be called art, even if the department of design had fallen to Holman Hunt's lot and we have no evidence that it ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... scourged; they came in their rambles upon a slave auction where a fine mulatto girl was being pinched and prodded and trotted up and down the room like a horse to show how she moved, that "bidders might satisfy themselves," as the auctioneer said, of the soundness of the article to be sold. John Johnston and John Hanks and Abraham Lincoln saw these sights with the unsophisticated eyes of honest country lads from a free State. In their home circle it seems that slavery was always ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... the resolution, or if the bankrupt satisfies the Board of Trade that the remuneration is excessive, the Board may review the same and fix the remuneration. A trustee may not receive any remuneration for services rendered in any other capacity, e.g. as solicitor, auctioneer, &c., beyond that voted to him as trustee; nor may he share his remuneration with the bankrupt, the solicitor or other person employed about the bankruptcy; or receive from any person any gift, or other pecuniary or ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... Woodden. Have you looked at that Odontoglossum Pavo, and if so, what do you think of it?" and he nodded towards a plant which stood in the centre of the little group that was placed on the small table beneath the auctioneer's desk. It bore a spray of the most lovely white flowers. On the top petal (if it is a petal), and also on the lip of each of these rounded flowers was a blotch or spot of which the general effect was similar to the iridescent eye on the tail feathers of a peacock, whence, I suppose, the flower was ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... cheap,—a prayer for a ticket to heaven, a diploma for an honourable citizenship. Hide yourself under a bushel quickly, for if your real usefulness were known to the world you would soon be knocked down to the highest bidder by the public auctioneer. Why do men and women like to advertise themselves so much? Is it not but an instinct derived from the ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... was a reason and a good one. Money was needed for the laddies who were going—needed for all sorts of things. To buy them small comforts, and tobacco, and such things as the government might not be supplying them. And so they asked me to be their auctioneer. ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... clerk immediately countered with another hundred, and looked as though he was ready to go on. That was the knock-down blow. Shott put his hands in his pockets, leaned back in his chair, and dolefully shook his head in response to all the coaxings and blandishments of the auctioneer. The hammer fell. "Name, please," was called; the lawyer's clerk passed up a slip of paper, and a thunderbolt fell on the company when the auctioneer read out, "Mr. Thomas Hankin." Hankin had bought the ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... quivering hand just as though he were in the witness box; but then, as his father was a lawyer, possibly Gusty often experimented on himself, since he meant to either take up the same pursuit in life, or give his magnificent voice a chance to earn him a living in the role of an auctioneer. ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Afloat • George A. Warren
... had lived forty years under the same roof with my grandmother; she knew how faithfully she had served her owners, and how cruelly she had been defrauded of her rights; and she resolved to protect her. The auctioneer waited for a higher bid; but her wishes were respected; no one bid above her. She could neither read nor write; and when the bill of sale was made out, she signed it with a cross. But what consequence was that, when she had a big ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... he was an auctioneer, and this was the regular fruit auction that is held on this same corner every morning of the year. Many other things besides fruit are sold at these auctions; in fact, almost everything in Key West is bought or sold at auction; certainly all fruit is. For an ...
— Wakulla - A Story of Adventure in Florida • Kirk Munroe
... Fielding himself seems to have felt, a "Jest a little overacted;" but there is one scene in the piece of undeniable freshness and humour, to wit, that in which Cock, the famous salesman of the Piazzas—the George Robins of his day—is brought on the stage as Mr. Auctioneer Hen (a part taken by Mrs. Charke). His wares, "collected by the indefatigable Pains of that celebrated Virtuoso, Peter Humdrum, Esq.," include such desirable items as "curious Remnants of Political Honesty," "delicate ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... house in which all the rooms are on the ground-floor. An auctioneer's advertisement often runs—"large weatherboard cottage, twelve rooms, etc.," or "double-fronted brick cottage." The cheapness of land caused nearly all suburban houses in Australia to be built without upper ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... an auction in a general way, is good. If you hear the auctioneer crying his sales, it means bright prospects and fair treatment ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... things. On this occasion the Pigot diamond had come into his hands. It is a very fine brilliant, but objected to by the connoisseurs as not having sufficient depth. It was valued at L40,000. But at this sale the auctioneer could not raise its price above L9500, or guineas. He then appealed to his audience, a crowd of the fair ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... a warning and the buyers flocked from the building. Outside, the auctioneer, a smooth-faced, glib-tongued man, was already mounting the rostrum. Calling for silence he began his speech. On this evening of festival, he said, he would be brief. The lots he had to offer to the select body of connoisseurs he saw before him, were the property of the ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... They were not people of wealth or show, but something much better. Henry lived in retirement in the country, not having an aptitude for business, but a sensible person in other respects. George was an auctioneer, but left business and became a very ardent missionary preacher; and Walter was a respectable physician. William was placed in easy circumstances by his marriage. Their sister Lucy, Mrs. Russel of New York, told me that she was very much amused one day by something that her brother William said ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... Major Vernon," he said—the Major had assumed the name of Vernon, as agreed upon between himself and Henry Dunbar—"the very thing," repeated the landlord; "you might say it had been made to order like. There's a sale comes off next Thursday. Mr. Grogson, the Shorncliffe auctioneer, will sell, at eleven o'clock precisely, the furniture and lease of the snuggest little box in these parts—Woodbine Cottage it's called—a sweet pretty little place, as was the property of old Admiral Manders. The admiral died in the house, ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... it is, it is in a first-rate situation, and a fashionable neighbourhood. (Auctioneer called it 'a gentlemanly residence.') A series of little closets squeezed up into the corner of a dark street—but a Duke's Mansion round the corner. The whole house just large enough to hold a vile smell. The air breathed in it, at the best ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... to see it every time I went any higher. The rascal of an auctioneer kept saying, 'Pass it to the lady.' At last I got it for five pounds eight. Oh, I wouldn't have paid one ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... reasonable growth a turn for observation originally less than mediocre; but it is not the natural observer's method of seeing things, and it is not the natural artist's method of presenting them. If the critics in this case were in the right we should have to acknowledge an auctioneer's catalogue ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... engender disease, which make them very liable to sudden death; or their master may be killed in a duel, or at a horse-race, or in a drunken brawl; then his creditors are active in looking after the estate; and next, the blow of the auctioneer's hammer separates them perhaps ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
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