In the meantime, unchecked and undiscovered, this simple and transparent scheme invariably works to a charm—how proud the man always is to learn that the late Judge V—— recommended him as a connoisseur of anything! he hastens to sell his china, if his wife be willing and have any to sell, and he manages to think of someone else who will probably sell, should he chance to have none himself. The flip-mug has been filled many a time to the old-time toast, “Success to Trade”—and yet the base china hunters are really honest fellows enough in every-day life. Alas! that greed for things so beautiful should so deform the soul! Such duplicity is, however, rare. I tell of it only to express my abhorrence, my condemnation. Dissimulation is seldom necessary. You are sometimes falsely accused of it when your motives are as open as the light of day. After telling with exact truth precisely what I intended to do with some pieces of china, I was answered, with an angry toss of the head, “Why didn’t ye tell me first-off ye didn’t want me to know.” We are sometimes, in our china hunts, brought into close contact with baser crimes than falsehood and duplicity. We have a number of daintily-shaped pieces of sprigged china, with a graceful ribbon border, which are known to us by the name of “Beach ware,” but which would be generally and more correctly called “cottage china.” These six-legged teapots and creamjugs of “Beach ware” received their descriptive and pretty title from the simple folk of whom they were bought, not from the name of their maker nor from their place of manufacture. “Beach ware” was found in crates or boxes along the beach on the shores of Barnegat Bay at the beginning of this century. It was part of the cargo of a great English ship laden with china, which was lured to destruction and robbed by a notorious family of Barnegat “wreckers,” one of whose members died not many years ago at the age of ninety years, having served in his youth a well-deserved term of twenty years’ imprisonment in State Prison, the sentence received at his trial for cruel robbery and murder through “wrecking.” [Illustration: “Beach Ware.”]