PORTRITS OF THE PEOPLE.

Auckland Star, Volume III, Issue 812, 24 August 1872, Page 3

PORTRITS OF THE PEOPLE.

X,—THE AUCTIONEER

The oft repeated words "going, going' crone," form not only the daily phraseology of the busy-tongued auctioneer as his lots in numerical order, one by one, or •when his dinner is waiting in clusters of twos and threes, are dispersed among his attentive auditory, but they form also the silent language of life. We are all numbered, breathing articles, in the living catalogue of human beings, and are " going, going," and ere long the final " gone" will inevitably follow. We frequently hear allusions to " under the hammer," words of varied import, "which in their general acceptation have but one significant meaning. The auctioneers' fairy hammer, lisht and airy in its flourishes and triumphs, seems to possess a strange power in scattering households to the four winds of heaven in cases of divorce, of sudden exit from ono country to another, and of departures to that bourne —■ Whence no traveller returns. The hammer—not that of the auctioneer—has exercised a wonderful influence upon the activities of the world : it is one of those giants of early times which have wrought into shape the majority of the conveniences of life, and worked more miracles than did all the saints of Butler's chronology. From the earliest recorded ages man with tho hammer has striven to escape the curse of labour, and vrith the same iron hand lie still exerts himself for the further advancement of his kind ; with the hammer he covered earth's waste places with manufactories and homes, and yet, the world to conquer, is still before him ; he labours as hard as ever, the sweat still hangs upon his brow as his frame wears wearily away. When we think of the productions of the hammer we begin to realize somewhat of the meaning of tho old fable, and see how it came to pass that the great Scythian or Scandinavian captain Odin subdued his people with the hammer, which subsequently displayed the indomitable strength of the Saxon race. But we turn to the lesser hammer Weilded by Our facetious auctioneer. Our auctioneer clearly is a necessary appendage, amid the vicissitudes of civilization, j to tlie skirts of commerce and trade. His I peculiar calling is distributive rather than | productive, except in funny sayings and | borrowed witticisms. He is the good genii I among the wrecks of love and fortune, and | whatever we may think, he evidently does \ his best for his per centage, and for those j ■who seek his timely assistance. lie is : fortunate in not making bad debts ; and merrily he wags his tongue upon the ; merits of an eight-day clock, or a wash- i stand, or a cask of butter, until his thrilling eloquence tickles the fancy or the highest bidder, who, of necessity, becomes the purchaser, and brings down upon the palm the stroke of the tell-tale hammer. Nothing comes amiss to our auctioneer; he is well acquainted with the comparative value of all kinds of merchandise, land, ware, corn, and livestock, In the City of Auckland he is what the speedy Yankee would term an " Institution," without tarnishing his reputable hands with the sale of the human article which happily belongs to history. The auctioneer has a keen, restless eye, is smart and shapeable, with a white hat of course, and a tongue of singular agihty ; that " unrulj' member," as poor Charles Lamb would say, which some persons are unable properly to govern. Our auctioneer has no occasion to imitate George Kobins of poetic memory, because no splendid mansions need describing; nor are any elm-shaded parks likely soon to come Tinder his colonial hammer, nor is he, with all his ready jokes, like the humourous Josh Billings. Our auctioneer, good luck to him, does not vulgarly descend like the American auctioneer, and lively writer, to the degradation of the language of Shakspere and Milton. We decidedly and empnatically object to the maltreatment of words and slang used simply to gratify a grovelling taste. Our auctioneer, as already intimated, can judge fairly of utensils, implements, watches, jewellery, shirts, shoes, bedsteads, and of every conceived thing, from Dore's Illustrated Bible to the irresistible history of Jack the Giant-Killer. He appears, moreover, to be happily constituted with a surprising fund of animal spirits, despite a few indentations in his cheek, which are not the result of lean feeding, but caused, we opine, by tho constant motion of the tongue, which may attract inwards, by stormy exercise, the .unconscious sympathy of the twin sides of his good-hu-moured face. "Wonderful is the gitt of the gab," exclaimed George Stephen**, when out-talked by a lawyer. Ike old engineer sent the locomot.ve over the grten heart of his country, but he evidently did not possess the winning power of the tongue. The auctioneer is among the more noticeable men of the city 5 he is surrounded by all kinds of marketable commodities, and these are placed at nis disposal'within the radiating boundary of his calculating vision The grocwthe butterman, the agriculturalist, the tailor, the pawnbroker, and the new chum seek his room, hang upon bis unique utterances, and watch the active glances of his eye. He usually siandsor sits, like a glorified monarch, avj heads of the people, and deals out grace fully or humourously, as the.object demands, his shining oomments «pon articles associated with his little EL' ijead invariably moves from right WC'ft and :from left, to right, ift&ihe given figures in simple adffion, up to a certain point, fall from his tongue in rapidandconfused succession. In ki« livelier aspects the auctioneer is a « perfect cure " for that indigenous melancholy which occasionally glooms the colonial spirit. In this respect he is a sort of physician, although he possesses no college diploma ; nothing, indeed, beyond his compulsory license. He is, moreover, t retailer of pleasant sallies upon city incidents, and descants with gusto upon the angelic appearance of Justice, abov, the vale of fashion, as a kind of rebuke to the short-comings of citizens, but upor a closer inspection of the classical ffgun he finds that the mission of this emblematic image is not a mission of warning am reproof, not a, mute invocation to th. god of fashion, but merely the crystal lized question, " Why don t you insure P His day's business Sjbeing over tb Batisfied auctioneer retires to in

suburban villa, in the calm seclusion of nature and ti-tree, to smoke his extensive meerschaum, or full flavoured cigar; and as he watches the wreathing circles of smoke ascendiig into the evening air he muses on passing events, reads in the Evening Star his own brief history and the uprising and down-falling of the sharemarket. He does a little too in shares, if not in the training of knowing pigeons, but he is not sufficiently green to accept the hollow music of a " Green Harp," or the tempting statistics of a fairy gold mine. His life is a life of social enjoyment, cares press lightly on him; and if a shadow or a shower cross his path they are but momentary —evanescent as the passing cloud lined with sunshine —and radiant with the hues of the rainbow. Sketches.