still, pulling down with her sharp, wicked claws my proudest masterpiece, a miniature chandelier of wire and glass beads over which I had spent many a weary hour. I burst into a loud wail of hopeless despair; the bedraggled kitten rushed frightened from my side, shedding odors of Araby as she bounded away, “An amber scent of odorous perfume Her harbinger.” Ah! never again, even at sight of housemaids’ broken spoils, have I felt such heart-breaking grief. To this day, when I look back at the plate here shown and the little coffee-cans of the blue Tournay sprigged set which I now know to be Crown Derby, and to have been bought by Uncle Royal in a sudden streak of extravagance (perhaps he, too, was china-mad); to this day I grieve for their companion, the little broken cup-plate, and again I smell the sweet, cloying fragrance of rose-water. These old dark blue plates also tell a tale. They are known to us as “the doctor’s pie-plates,” not from the comical figure of Dr. Syntax with which they are decorated, but so called in derision. An old New England physician, a pie-hater, stole, one Thanksgiving eve, twenty-eight carefully made pies that his patient wife and daughters had provided for his Thanksgiving guests. He rose stealthily in the dead of night, threw lemon and apple, quince and cranberry, mince and “Marlborough” pies to the pigs, and hid the blue pie-plates in an old rat-nibbled, cobweb-filled, musty, dusty coach that had stood for half a century in his carriagehouse, and in which his English grandmother had journeyed in state throughout New England. Thirty years later, after his death, at the destruction of the old coach, these hidden pie-plates were found by his descendants. They are therefore not simply “good pieces of blue,” they are ceramic monuments of the household tyranny of man. Shall I ever forget my first view of my largest and choicest Washington pitcher? It stood filled with dried grasses and pressed and varnished autumn leaves, and painfully covered with an ignominious shell of decalcomanie and scrap-book pictures, on a table in a lonely lighthouse. Only by its shape did we know it, the old watermelon shape of Liverpool ware. Not a vestige of its early decoration could be seen, but we bought it as a hazard of fortune. Oh, the delight I felt when I reached home and scraped off Pauline Hall’s smirking and high-colored countenance, and saw with a thrill of friendly recognition the black-lined face of my own solemn and immaculate Washington surmounting her full-blown, rosy shoulders and scarlet and gold bodice. Never do I look at my fully restored pitcher but I see him again, as then, with his dignified head turned very much aside, as if sadly shocked at the position and dress he found himself in.