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A large group of buyers stood round the auctioneer, or followed
him when, between his pauses, he wandered on from one lot of
plantation produce to another, like some philosopher of the
Peripatetic school delivering his lectures in the shady groves of
the Lyceum. His companions were timber-dealers, yeomen, farmers,
villagers, and others; mostly woodland men, who on that account
could afford to be curious in their walking-sticks, which
consequently exhibited various monstrosities of vegetation, the
chief being cork-screw shapes in black and white thorn, brought to
that pattern by the slow torture of an encircling woodbine during
their growth, as the Chinese have been said to mould human beings
into grotesque toys by continued compression in infancy. Two
women, wearing men's jackets on their gowns, conducted in the rear
of the halting procession a pony-cart containing a tapped barrel
of beer, from which they drew and replenished horns that were
handed round, with bread-and-cheese from a basket.


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