Were it not for the public house, and the hat and feathers, we should know that this punch-bowl was surely made purposely to use at funerals. One of the finest punch-bowls ever figulated is twenty inches and a half in diameter. It is of Liverpool Delft, painted in blue with ships and a landscape, and the inscription, “Success to the Africa Trade, George Dickinson.” When we remember of what the “Africa Trade” consisted—the slave-traffic—we wonder the punch did not poison the drinkers. I have often seen this bowl referred to by authors as of extraordinary and unique size. It is not as large as the grand blue and white punch-bowl used by the first Continental Congress, a bowl which is now at Morristown, at Washington’s Headquarters. I do not know whether this mammoth Congressional bowl is Canton china or English delft, for, since it stands in a cupboard, one cannot examine it closely. The color and design are good, and the size impressive, and altogether it is a noble relic, for this courage-giver of those troubled and anxious Federal days may have played no unimportant part in the affairs and history of our nation; I regard it with grateful awe and veneration, and also with a rather unworthy pride and satisfaction in its great size. There were hosts of punch-bowls at that date in America. Watson wrote in 1830, of old colonial Philadelphia: “A corner was occupied by a beaufet, which was a corner closet with a glass door, in which all the china and plate were intended to be displayed for ornament as well as for use. A conspicuous article was always a great china punch-bowl.” And they needed a punch-bowl, and a large one too, if we can trust the local annals of the time. William Black recorded in his diary in 1744, that he was given in Philadelphia cider and punch for lunch, rum and brandy before dinner, punch, Madeira, port, and sherry at dinner, bounce and liqueurs with the ladies, and wine and spirits and punch until bedtime. Well might he say that in Philadelphia “they were as liberal with wine as an apple-tree with its fruit on a windy day.”