It is small wonder that the craze for the gathering together and hoarding of teapots has assailed many a feminine china hunter in many a land, and that many a noble collection has been made. Teapots are so friendly and appealing, one cannot resist them. No china-loving woman can pass them by, they are so domestic as well as beautiful; a steam of simple cheer and homeliness ascends forever (though invisible) from their upturned spouts, and a gentle genie of cosiness and welcome dwells therein. And then their forms are so varied! Plates, from their nature, necessarily show a prosaic flatness and similarity of outline; cups and saucers are limited in their capabilities of diversification; but teapots! you may find a new shape for every day in the year. In America we have an extra incentive and provoker of interest in the extraordinary great age assigned to teapots. You can hardly find one of any pretension to antiquity in America that is asserted to be less than two hundred years old; and two centuries and a half are as naught to teapot-owners. Sophisticated possessors are a little shy about assigning their old teapots to the Mayflower invoice, since we have heard so many incredulous and bantering jibes about the size and tonnage of that capacious ship; but country owners are troubled by no such fears of ridicule, and boldly assert the familiar tradition; while the pages of our catalogues of loan collections containing entry after entry of “teapots brought over in 1620,” “teapots three hundred years old,” show the secret faith and belief of even more travelled and studied teapot-owners. 1630—1640—1650! It would seem, could we trust tradition, that teapots just swarmed in America in those years. There were none then in England or Holland or China, and no tea even in England; but it is proudly boasted that we had teapots and, of course, tea also in America. I wonder we do not claim the teapot as a Yankee invention! The Chinese knew naught of any such “conveniencys” at that time; they stupidly steeped their tea in a cup or dish or bowl; indeed, they do so still in the great shops, and tea-gardens, and yaamens of China, and would doubtless have conservatively clung to the same simple and primitive fashion in all their houses to this day, had not the opened traffic with the western world shown them the restless craze for change common to nearly all Europeans and awakened in them a desire for novelty and improvement.