honeysuckle when I espied it in a farm-house window—I carried away the scent of the honeysuckle when I bought the vase. This old mottled stone-ware jug, with the hound handle, stood in the deep shade of a stone wall by the side of a sunny hay-field when first it met my view. It was filled with honest home-brewed beer for the hay-makers. We sat fuming and sizzling in the hot sun, watching them spread and turn the fragrant hay until the beer had all been drunk (and we did not have to wait long), and we bore the jug off in triumph, breathing to us forever the scent of new-mown hay with, to speak truthfully, a slight tinge of stale beer. A halo of “sweet Sabean odors” fairly envelops all family china. In those blue and white Canton sugar-bowls, and in that great jar with the red lacquered cover, my grandmother kept her fragrant spiced rose-leaves—there are rose-leaves in them now. In that tall pitcher she always placed the first lilac and cherry blooms—and lo! as I look at the poor cracked thing, “sweet is the air with budding haws and white with blossoming cherry-trees.” More prosaic and homely, but equally memory-sweet, what a penetrating aroma of strong green tea rises out of that copper-lustre teapot! What a burnt and bitter, but wholly good-smelling steam arises from that old flip-mug, the steam from many a quart of flip brewed from New England rum, and home-made beer, stirred with the red-hot iron loggerhead. [Illustration: Crown Derby Plate.] Like Charles Lamb, I was born china-loving. “I am not conscious of a time when china jars and saucers were introduced into my imagination.” When I was a little child the dearest treasures of my doll’s house were a small cup-plate of purest porcelain, delicately bordered with a diagonal design of tiny berries and spike-shaped bachelor’s buttons and fine lines of gold, and a nicked India china tea-caddy, cork-stoppered, and filled with precious rose-water—rose-water of my grandmother’s own make, distilled in the old rose-water still that stood, when unused, a cumbrous and mysterious machine under the dusty eaves of the garret. I suspect that still had been employed in early colonial days to manufacture a less innocuous liquid than rose-water, but now only the petals of the Queen of the Prairie, the sweet-brier, the cinnamon roses, went into its innocent limbec; and its sweet-scented product was intensified by the contents of one of the long, thin, gilt glass bottles of ottar of roses that my great-uncle, Captain Royal, who “followed the sea,” brought home in such vast numbers from China. One day there poured out from the door of my doll’s house a penetrating fragrance of roses; I peered within—the keen anguish of that moment fills me even now; the tea-caddy had fallen—nay, had been knocked on my precious little plate, and both were broken. There on her back, drenched with my cherished rose-water, lay the iconoclast, my miserable maltese kitten, in mischief