In past years any stray china-lover who wished to see and to learn had to search well to find any public collections, or even specimens of old china, in America. In town-halls, in the curiosity shops of eccentric old women, or in the “museums” of land-stranded old sailors, a few pieces might be seen—not saved nor shown because they were china, but because “Parson Boardman, who preached forty-nine years in this town, owned this tea-set;” or “this china was taken out of the cabin of an English frigate in 1813;” or “these mugs were used when George Washington passed through the town.” In this class of discursive and disjointed collections, though of course in a superior and highly honored way, might be placed the china of the Museum of the East India Marine Company in Salem, of whose arrangement Eleanor Putnam wrote, “it was as if each sea-captain had lounged in and hustled down his contribution in any convenient vacant space.” In that old museum, as I remember it a decade ago, elaborate models of Chinese junks and American merchant vessels bore on their miniature bowsprits strange additions to their rigging, and shadowed by their dusty hulls queer and varied trophies, queerer then than now—sharks’ teeth, Turkish pipes, sandal-wood beads, Italian crucifixes, Peruvian pottery, and South Sea shells and savage weapons. Teak-wood furniture and miniature palanquins and pagodas sheltered many curious china treasures which I vaguely recall, queer in name and shape—nests of egg-shell saki-cups and saki-bowls galore; ink-stones of green celadon with their accompanying water-bottles and little cakes of gilded India-ink; perfume flasks of painted Japanese wares; bottles of purest porcelain for Oriental hair-oil, or, rather, hair-glue; pottery jars full of unpleasant-looking mouldy mysteries, which might be preserved fruit or might be mummies; “plaster boxes” lettered in Chinese; strange triangular bits of blue and white Persian porcelain “to clean out shoes with;” old Liverpool mugs taken from a wreck and wildly labelled “from Ceylon;” and, chief of all, two vast soup-tureens of purest white Canton porcelain, duck-shaped, six feet in length from beak to tail by _memory’s_ measurement. In the cold light of recent and more mature inspection these two great East India birds of good cheer, like many another remembered object of the good old times, shrank to about half their ancient size; but are still impressive relics of the great days and great dinners of the old East India Marine Company, the dinners where, filled to the wings with some hot, well-peppered Indian broth, the twin tureens graced the board around which gathered all these old treasure-bringing and treasure-giving Salem mariners.