Much specially decorated porcelain did come to us from China; there is plenty of proof in old letters, bills, diaries, and shipping receipts, that persons in both America and England ordered services of porcelain such as we now call Lowestoft, to be made and decorated for them in China. These orders were sometimes filled in a manner which was vastly disappointing. Miss Leslie, the sister of the eminent painter, related that she ordered a dinner service to be made and painted for her in China. She directed that a coat of arms should be placed in the centre of each plate, and made a careful drawing of the desired coat of arms and pasted it in the centre of a specimen plate, and wrote under it, “Put this in the middle.” What was her dismay when, on the arrival of the china, she found on every piece not only the coat of arms, but the words, indelibly burnt in, “Put this in the middle.” Another person ordering porcelain in China sent out a book-plate as a guide for outline in decoration, and was much disgusted when the service arrived to find it painted by the literal-minded Chinese artist in lines of funereal black like the book-plate, instead of the gay colors the china-buyer had desired, and which were then so fashionable. But I feel that in all this about the questionable Lowestoft I am neither quite fair nor quite liberal to the claims of the far Orient. We do not regard with doubt or with question of English co-operation all the contributions of China to our early table furnishings. About the pieces just described, many collectors are reckless in judging and naming, and too often unjust to our Asiatic ceramic purveyors; but much porcelain came to America which is known and acknowledged to be Chinese, and which has never for a moment had the shadow of suspicion of Occidental manipulation cast over it—I mean “blue Canton china.” A hand whose clear and perfect touch made beautiful, yet rendered truthfully everything she described, wrote thus of such porcelain: “The china here, as in all genuine Salem cupboards, was chiefly of the honest old blue Canton ware. There were shining piles of these plates, which while they are rather heavy to handle, always surprise one by being so thin at the edges. There were generous teacups like small bowls, squat pitchers with big noses, and a tureen whose cover had the head of a boar for a handle. And in all this the blue was dull and deep in tint, with a certain ill-defined vaporous quality at the edges of the lines, and the white of the cool greenish tinge of a duck’s egg. You can buy blue Canton to-day, but it is not old blue Canton.”