A few stray polychrome Chinese bowls of the description known as “real Indian” I have found, and I hear that whole dinner services of such wares were imported. General Gage had one in Boston, and a few of its beautiful plates escaped destruction at the “looting” of the Province House. But the old services of Oriental china that I have seen have all been blue Canton or Lowestoft. The graceful blue and white vase here shown I at first sight fancied to be Chinese, but now believe to be Persian. As the country owner of this oddly-shaped and rather curiously-decorated vase knew nothing of how it had been acquired by the members of her family, nor how long it had been possessed by them, nor whence it came, nor indeed anything, save that it had stood for many years on her grandmother’s best room mantel-shelf, it may be a comparatively modern piece of ware. I have woven about it and haloed around it an Arabian Nights romance of astonishing plot and fancy, in which a gallant Yankee sailor, a hideous Arabian merchant, and a black-eyed, gauze-robed houri fill the leading parts; and perhaps my imaginative story of the presence of the Persian outcast in a staid New England farm-house is just as satisfactory as many of the wondrous china tales we hear. An everlasting interest rests in all Oriental china in attempting to translate the meaning of the Oriental stamps and marks. I have never deciphered any save a few of the hundred forms of _Show_—the Chinese greeting, “May you live forever,” and the marks on one old Chinese bowl, which signified _wan_, a symbol used only on articles made for talented literary persons; _Pŏ koo chin wan_ “for the learned in antiquities and old curiosities,” and the mark of the instruments used by authors—the stone for grinding ink, the brushes for writing, and the roll of paper. I was highly delighted, and indeed very proud, when I discovered the meaning of these Chinese letters. I tried to fancy that it was a significant coincidence—a friendly message from the old world to the new—that pointed out that I too belonged to what is in China the ruling class, the literati. But the more closely I examined my literary tickets, the more depressed I became. I found, alas, that these flattering marks were never placed on my bowl by the Orientals; they were skilfully painted over the glaze in oil colors by the base, jesting Occidental who gave the piece of old porcelain to me.