A recent visit to my dearly loved and warmly-remembered old museum grieved my heart; its charm was gone. Great, light, airy rooms have been added to the old building; an arranger, a labeller, and a model cataloguer have ruthlessly invaded the dusty cases and weeded out the boxes of dried-up and shrivelled fruits, the skins of moth-eaten birds, and of seedy and disreputable fishes. The Chinese paper-fans and woven baskets, once rare enough to be carefully treasured in a museum, now seen in every dry-goods shop in the land, seem wholly to have disappeared. The iconoclasts have prosaically separated each old sea-captain’s relics into parcels and placed them in wonderfully well-arranged and classified cases, labelled Madagascar, Alaska, Sumatra, or whatever the land of their early home may be. I suppose the shoe-cleaners and hair-oil bottles are there somewhere in their properly assigned places, but I did not search for them. I glanced at my old friends, the punch-bowls, and the great duck-tureens, but the old-time glamour, the “unstudied grace” of the museum was gone. In many public buildings at the present day, among treasured colonial relics, may be seen fine specimens of old china. A neighbor of the East India Marine Company, the Essex Institute, has a small but interesting and well-labelled collection of old Salem china. The Bostonian Society displays in its rooms in the old State-House in Boston a number of old Liverpool pitchers and about twenty Staffordshire plates and platters with American designs, as well as some pieces of the china of John Hancock and a few other good Boston citizens. In the rooms of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, in Locust Street, Philadelphia, may be seen a number of interesting pieces, including a set of Dresden cups and saucers, presented to Benjamin Franklin by Madame Helvétius, of Auteuil, that extraordinary friend of Franklin’s whose behavior so shocked Mrs. Adams. By the side of this Dresden set are the beautiful coffee-cups, teacups, saucers, teapot, creamer, bowl, and chocolate-pot presented to Mrs. Robert Morris, wife of the United States Minister of Finance, by Luzerne, the French Minister; a cup and saucer said to have been used at the wedding of George Washington; a punch-bowl made for the Society of the Cincinnati by order of Colonel Hampden; several Washington pitchers; a Perry pitcher, and an Erie Canal pitcher. In the Deerfield Memorial Hall, in the rooms of the Connecticut Historical Society, of the various societies of antiquity, and local associations throughout New England, may be seen good pieces of old pottery and porcelain, often with an interesting and doubtless authentic story attached, but too frequently wildly and amazingly labelled as to place of manufacture and date.