It was only the most popular and universally widespread designs, such as that of the Landing of Lafayette or the Pilgrim, or the Boston State-House, that were found on all the pieces of dinner services and sold together. Sets were formed, usually having the same border, with different designs on the different-sized plates. We found in the summer of 1891, under the eaves of an old farm-house in Worcester County, a painted blue sea-chest which contained a sight to make a china hunter both smile and weep. The dust of years covered the chest, the floor, the ladder-like stairs that led to the attic. Every step of the staircase had to be cleared for our climbing entrance of the accumulated and forgotten autumn stores of what had been ears of seed-corn, but were now only rat-nibbled cobs, bunches of cobwebbed herbs, broken chairs, dried and withered gourds and pumpkins. The house-mistress frankly acknowledged that she hadn’t “been up garret for years,” she had been “so poorly and tissicky.” We smiled when we opened the lid of the chest and saw the familiar and much-loved color, the color of our guiding star in our search, the rich, dark blue. But we grieved as we lifted the pieces out, for fully half of them were broken. There was an entire dinner service of the “Beauties of America,” set of J. & W. Ridgway. All had the same medallion border that is here shown on the Philadelphia Library plate. As the chief beauties of America in those days were not fair maids, but almshouses, all the larger dishes and tureens bore monotonously ugly views of square and many-windowed almshouses. The views on the gravy tureens, with their little accompanying platters, were all of the Exchange at Charleston; the large platters were of the Capitol at Washington; the smaller, of the Boston Hospital. The twelve dinner plates bore a view of New York City Hall; the breakfast-plates were of the Philadelphia Library; the soup-plates all bore the view of the Boston Octagon Church; little plates six inches and a half in diameter had a view of the Boston Insane Hospital; the pickle leaves and handleless bowls of the ladles were still different, bearing a small, unnamed house with the same border. Tumbled in a crushed heap in the corner of the chest was the saddest sight of all, a superb old Worcester cream-pitcher, four pieces of Plymouth porcelain, an India china tea-set, three Pilgrim plates, all broken, surmounted by two heavy tankards which the owner thought were pewter, but which were solid silver. They are all there still, huddled in sad fragments in the old blue chest; and the Staffordshire dinner set also, for the owner, though ignorant of the value of the crockery and china, of their number even, and their condition, still “couldn’t spare them” when we asked to buy the whole pieces and thus rescue them from the sad fate of their brothers. The wife was deaf and poor and sick, and the husband looked sicker and poorer still, but both were stubborn, good-temperedly