The newspapers of the times abounded in advertisements of blue Canton china, such as this from the _Columbia Centinel_ of December 19, 1792: “Superfine Nankin blue enamelled landscape and fancy pattern China-ware direct from China: among other articles are complete dinner setts, tea coffee & breakfast do; Teacups & saucers & Teapots separately do; dinner breakfast & dessert flat & Deep Plates; Punchbowles Mugs & Pitchers.” Frequently the china was sold direct from the vessel, or from the wharf alongside. How truly Oriental that old Canton china must have been to Boston and Providence and Salem dames when they had tiptoed down on the rough old wharf in wooden clogs or velvet-tipped golo-shoes, their fair faces covered with black velvet masks if the weather waxed cold or the wind blew east; when they had seen the great weather-beaten ship, with its stained sails and blackened ropes and cables—the ship that had brought the fragile porcelain cargo to port—the Lively Prudence, the Lively Peggy, the Lively Sally, the Lively Molly, or any of the dozen great ships named by Yankee shipmasters and ship-owners for the lively young women of their acquaintance. They had been on board the Indiaman, perhaps, and smelt its bilge-water and its travelled stale ship-smells; had watched the strange picturesque foreign sailors, barefooted and earringed, as they brought the packages and spread out the boxes on deck, or carried in their brawny arms the great crates on Scarlett’s or Rowe’s Wharf, and with their bronzed tattooed hands took out the precious porcelain from its rice-straw packing and rice-paper wrapping. How that old blue Canton must have savored forever to the fair buyers of the “bloom raisins,” the cinnamon, the ginger, palm-oil, gum-copal, and ivory, the tea, the otto-of-roses, that had been fellow-travellers for months in the good ship’s hold; and have spoken, too, of far-away lands and foreign sights, and of “the magic and mystery of the sea.” Truly, we of to-day have lost all the romance, the sentiment, that brightened and idealized colonial shopping, when we know not the ship, nor scarcely the country from whence come our stores.