SOLD TO RILEY

   The auctions I especially enjoyed were those when the Hay-wards, Uncle Sidney and Aunt Beatrice, went with us. Between Aunt Beatrice's theatrical engagements they lived in Wayland,     and if they were not traveling, my father always asked them to come along. Aunt Beatrice toured Keith's vaudeville circuit as Beatrice Herford. She was one of the foremost monologists and very popular in her heyday. She acted continuously, on stage and off. I can still hear her singing two songs that she considered very sad and that ended with a profusion of crocodile tears; the more     I laughed the harder she cried. One of the songs was about a robin who was extremely conceited and was finally eaten by a great thomas cat; the other was about a little Chinaman who went beneath his ladylove's window to serenade her, and was quickly finished off when she dropped a washbowl on him. The word, `washbowl' was the cue for Aunt Beatrice to begin sobbing and   by the end of the song she would be crying so hard she could barely get her words out.
   In Wayland she had a miniature theatre (yokes Theatre) and      an equally miniature general store where I liked to play. Some-times I was the customer and she the shopkeeper and, at others, she the customer and I the shopkeeper. Her impersonations     were realistic and filled with enjoyable buffoonery.
   Long before she became professional she was an expert imper-sonator. One of her best remembered pranks was disguising   herself as a gypsy, knocking on the door of a house in Wayland and begging for a cup of tea. She had a pillow in her arms    dressed like a baby. The housewife, feeling sorry for her and her little child, let her in and invited her to sit at the kitchen table     while the tea was brewing. No sooner was Aunt Beatrice seated

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