Sometimes a single odd or beautiful piece of Oriental china was brought to America in the olden times by those far-roving and home-bringing old sea-captains, and the single specimen still exists—a stranger in a strange land. Such is the graceful little ewer here shown, a piece of Persian shape, but of pure Chinese paste, and “with antick shapes in China’s azure dyed.” This design, with its “little lawless azure-tinted grotesques,” forms a piece curious enough to be worthy a place in any cabinet. Such also is a dull green enamelled and crackled bowl which I own, and a Chinese dish of antique earthenware, which has been mended and riveted by some Oriental china-mender with gold wire. A great blue and white tall jar with red lacquered cover is unique in size as it is in its contents—long strings of sugar-coated Chinese sweetmeats, sweetmeats so unpleasant and outlandish in flavor and so mysterious in appearance that they were regarded with keen disfavor by simple stay-at-home New Englanders, who invested the innocent sweets with alarming attributes, and laid them under suspicion of concealing within their sugary surfaces bits of all the heathenish edibles—sharks’ fins, birds’ nests, puppies’ tails, and other unchristian foods that had been seen and even tasted in foreign lands by bold travelled mariners. Hence there still lie at the bottom of the great jar a few silken strings of shrivelled, unwholesome-looking black knobs like some strange Oriental beads; despised by generations of sweet-toothed children of the Puritans, and now too adamantine in consistency to be tasted or nibbled even by the boldest gourmand or curiosity-seeker of to-day. “Posy-holders” are found of India china with a rich decoration of red, blue, and gold, with little flecks of green, the cover pierced with holes to keep the stems of the flowers in place; “bowpots” also of similar porcelain and ornamentation. I have not found in my china hunting any old blue hawthorn jars, nor any fragile pieces of “grains-of-rice” porcelain, nor sets of covered saki-cups in scarlet and gold, nor dainty translucent cups that seem naught but glaze, though I have been shown them in other collections as country treasure trove. I have seen a few tall green crackle vases and jars, of age and dignity enough to chill unspoken within our lips any inquiry regarding or suggesting purchase. [Illustration: Persian Vase.]