These dainty egg-shell cups and saucers have also their memory, their lesson—a word softly spoken but clear; they were once owned by two silver-haired “antient maides” of Chippendale elegance and Pilgrim blood, who lived under the moss-covered, decaying rooftree of a pallid, gaunt, old colonial home in New England. These “last leaves on the tree” kept their dainty, shallow, apse-shaped china closets in a state of snowy purity, of precise and unvarying order, of unspotted contamination, which might be taken as an emblem of their narrow, pure, and monotonous lives. No thick, substantial modern wares, no gayly painted crockery, no vessels of common clay, stood on their well-ordered and softly shining shelves, just as no modern notions, no knowledge of the common, the evil things of life, had ever entered their simple minds, had ever shocked their fair souls. Fragile, graceful, antiquated, pale in decoration, were their weakly sprigged, lavender-bordered, delicately fluted cups; looking like their own softly wrinkled faces, their meagre, bent figures, their slender hands. Worn was the gilt on the china, faded was the furniture of their rooms, as ill-health had worn their gentle spirits. Rather scantily filled were their china shelves, as were thin and few their garments, as was sparsely filled their larder. Deep green shadows fell on the glass doors and white shelves of their china closets from the thick-branched old lilacs that close-screened each small-paned window, from the dark century-old cedars that overhung their home; death and loneliness and scanty means had shadowed their lives. My pure, dignified, and silent old cousins, no sweetly-perfumed, softly-tinted, strong-growing blossoms of New England life were you, but rather the sad, white, scentless “life everlasting” that waved like summer snow-drifts over your own sterile, rock-filled fields. These fragile porcelain emblems of your colorless life shall not be carelessly handled and rudely gazed at in their new home, but, close-hidden away in an old apple-wood beaufet which once stood beside your virginal china closets, shall forever teach to me the lesson of contentment, simplicity, and resignation which you showed in your gentle lives, the lesson which through your old china still lives—the lesson of peace and rest. [Illustration: Copper-Lustre Pitcher.]