The china called Lowestoft was, without doubt, the kind most desired and most fashionable in early Federal times throughout both North and South. Such was the dinner service of the Carrolls of Carrollton, with bands of rich brown and gold and a pretty letter C. Such was the family china of William Morris; of John Rutledge, with the initials J. R. and the shield and eagle; and the tea-service of John Dickinson, with blue and gold bands and his initials. Of Lowestoft china was one of the beautiful services of General Knox—his “best china” that was used on state occasions. It was banded with delicate lines of pale gray, black, and gold, and the rich coloring of red, blue, and gold was confined to the decoration in the centre of the plate. This was an eagle with extended wings, bearing on his breast the seal of the Society of the Cincinnati, a round shield with a group of appropriate figures surrounded by the motto, “Omnia relinquit servare rempublicam,” a motto certainly very significant of General Knox’s patriotism. The eagle was surmounted by a wreath of palm or laurel leaves tied with a knot of blue ribbon. Beneath the eagle were delicately formed initials about half an inch in height—L. F. and H. K.—the H. and K. intertwined just as General Knox always wrote them. This beautiful service was a gift to Mrs. Knox from her rich grandfather, General Waldo; a wedding gift, it is often asserted, though I had hardly supposed that her relatives, being so bitterly opposed to the _mésalliance_ of the “belle of Massachusetts” with the young clerk in a bookshop, had given her any such rich tokens of approval. Then, too, the runaway match was made at the beginning of the Revolutionary War, and Mrs. Knox, following her husband from battle-field to battle-field, would hardly have needed or thought of such fine china. The fact that it bears the decoration of the seal of the Cincinnati, points to a date after the establishment of that society. Lowestoft, too, was the china table-ware of John Hancock, the table-ware that he ordered to be thrust one side and replaced by old-fashioned pewter. And when he lay in his bedroom groaning with the gout and heard the rattle of a china plate on the table in the dining-room below, he ordered his servant to throw the precious but noise-making dish out of the window, and the thrifty black man saved the dainty Lowestoft by throwing it on the grass. But the every-day china, the common table-ware, of all these good American citizens and patriots—Knox, Hancock, Paul Revere, the Otises, Quincys, and a score that might be named—the plates and dishes of china from which they ate their daily bread, were not of Lowestoft, but of honest old blue Canton. IX. THE COSEY TEAPOT