In the long and apparently extravagant orders which George Washington sent to England previous to the Revolutionary War, for the purchase and exportation to him of dress goods and house and table furnishings of various descriptions, I find no mention of table china. In 1759 he wrote for “four Fashionable China Branches or Stands for Candles,” and for “Busts of Alexander the Great, Charles XII. of Sweden, Julius Cæsar, and King of Prussia, fifteen inches high and ten wide. Others smaller of Prince Eugene & Duke of Marlborough. Two wild Beasts twelve inches high and eighteen inches long, and Sundry Small Ornaments for the chimney piece.” As these were to be “finished neat and bronzed with copper,” or to be gilt, they were doubtless all of plaster or some similar composition. A portion of the items in the order were sent to him, the wild beasts being “Two Lyons.” These two plaster “lyons,” shorn of their golden lustre and painted ignominiously black, stood for years over a doorway at Mount Vernon, were inherited by Lawrence Washington, and sold in Philadelphia on April 22, 1891, for thirty dollars. I can find no hint of any china possessions of Washington until the War of the Revolution was gloriously ended. He had plenty of pewter—dinner dishes of that humble metal with his initials and crest are still preserved. His camp-service of forty pieces was entirely of pewter, and I doubt not the greater part also of his home table furnishings in his early married life. In his directions for remodelling and refurnishing his house at Mount Vernon, after the expiration of his terms as President, he ordered that a small room be appropriated for “the Sèvres china and other things of that sort which are not in common use.” Mr. Lossing says: “He undoubtedly referred to the sets of china which had been presented, one to himself, and the other to Mrs. Washington, by the officers of the French Army. The former was dull white in color, with heavy and confused scroll and leaf ornaments in bandeaux of deep blue, and having upon the sides of the cups and tureens, and in the bottoms of the plates, saucers, and meat dishes, the Order of the Cincinnati held by Fame personated by a winged woman with a trumpet. These designs were skilfully painted in delicate colors.” [Illustration] [Illustration: Cincinnati China.]