It has been easy for anyone, for everyone, who had any idea or knowledge of old china, to form a collection of china in America. Of course, the value of the accretion was variable, not so much resulting from the length of the purse of the gatherer as from his judgment and care in buying. It is still possible to obtain such a collection. The old china is not yet all discovered and culled from country towns. One china hunter found in Northampton, that besearched city, in a summer week in 1891—found and bought and bore away in triumph—a large States pitcher, a Boston State-House pitcher, a Trenton Falls plate, a Capitol plate, two State-House plates, several pieces bearing the design of McDonough’s victory, a dozen or more plates with English views, two helmet-pitchers, several pepper-pots, and, in addition to the “treasures of clay,” a tall clock and four harp-backed chairs that once were Jonathan Edwards’s, a Chippendale table, and various trophies of pewter and brass. Dealers might have visited these Northampton folk in vain, but this beguiling china hunter bore away his cart-load of old furniture and crockery for a sum total as small as in days of yore. It is for such slow and careful collectors that these pages are written, for the collectors who having read and studied all the foreign text-books and histories and manuals of pottery and porcelain still know very little of the china within their gates, the china to be gathered in America. The number of such china hunters is steadily crescent. In Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, china collections are being formed; and many of the finest specimens of American historical china that have been offered for sale in New York and Boston “antique shops” during the past year have been purchased and sent to California. [Illustration: A Beaufet.] It is a matter of course that this old china should show to its best advantage in an old-fashioned house, or in a new house built in “American colonial” style of architecture. But whatever the house may be in which all these loved china waifs are assembled and cherished, it should not conceal them, as in Charles Lamb’s “great house,” in a china-closet. A suitable resting-place for the old pieces is in the sheltering home in which it passed its early days—in a corner cupboard. This was in olden times called a “beaufatt,” or “bofet,” or “beaufet,” or “bofate,” or as Cowper wrote of it— “This china that decks the alcove Which here people call a buffet, But what the gods call it above Has ne’er been revealed to us yet.”