on upper shelves, never exploring in old window-seats, never lingering to examine separately and lovingly each plate in a great pile. Above all, think of ransacking a farm-house garret, “in cobwebbed corners, dusty and dim,” with the thermometer below zero—it is beyond my power of fancy to fathom such a scene. A fellow china hunter tells me a tale of a lonely drive and Arctic exploration, and of riding gayly home therefrom in the winter twilight, warming the cockles of her heart with four Baltimore & Ohio plates pressed closely to her side, with two Lafayette pepper-boxes and half a dozen Lowestoft custard-cups packed snugly in her muff, and with a Pennsylvania Hospital platter in the fur robe at her feet. I never believed her; it could not be true. China does not grow in winter, ’tis a fair summer flower, and must be gathered under summer suns. But to what out-of-the-way, simple, rustic scenes has our china hunting led us through the long summer days, scenes to be painted by Miss Wilkins or Mrs. Slosson. To country auctions—not the ill-ventilated, Hebrew-jostled, bawling arenas of city life, but auctions in country villages, on old farms, where the auctioneer, if the day be warm, stands outside the house on a door taken from its hinges and laid across two barrels on the green, or among the beds of flowering phlox and marigolds; where the lots for sale, unnumbered, uncatalogued, and unclassified are handed out, a heterogeneous company, to the presiding seller through the open windows behind him; where every small parcel of value is neatly tied up and labelled with the names of past owners—Aunt Hepsy, Mrs. Catey Doten, Old Job Greening; where every queer-gowned and queer-coated neighbor for miles around has driven over in every kind of vehicle to look at, if not to buy, the scattering house treasures. At these country auctions, china and ancient underclothes, or pewter porringers with feather pillows, may form a single “lot,” and you must buy all or none. If you purchase you pay your money at once to the auctioneer, with much friendly change-making by hard-fisted old farmers on either hand; the china is delivered to your eager hands, the underclothes are thrown to you or at you by the auctioneer over the heads of the audience; the hay-rakes, or churns, or quilting-frames, or whatever addenda may have been tacked to your porcelain, are brought around and piled in a little heap by the side of your chair, or if you have “backed up” your country wagon, are placed therein. I once bought six large bundles of neatly labelled pieces of woollen cloth, pieces of all the old petticoats and breeches and greatcoats that had been worn in that house for forty years, just to get one India china plate. A rugmaking—or I should say, “mat-braiding”—dame at my left, seeing my dismay at my unsought treasures and noting my love of china, offered to give me a modern match-box for the tidy bundle of pieces, which kindly