unwrapped it and hung it on my dining-room wall, where it now shines a glowing bit of dark color, a joy forever. Warned by many such dreary mistakes I am very shy of having china sent to me through any interest awakened by its description, and am equally shy of buying by proxy. “Let every eye negotiate for itself, And trust no agent.” I have learned also to listen with attention, not placing the slightest confidence in what I hear, and yet always to investigate with cheerfulness and alacrity. It is not, however, from elaborately detailed and willingly told stories that I have had knowledge of my richest “finds.” I have learned to “take a hint”—a maxim which should be eternally impressed on every china hunter. Learn to “grasp the skirt of happy chance;” let your motto be, “Semper paratus.” Let no suggestion of old people or old house-furnishings, no glimpse of blue color or sprigged surface, even on a broken sherd of crockery by the wayside, no hint of distant and out-of-the-way farms, no prospect of country sales, of “New England dinners,” no news of refurnishing old houses, no accounts of the death of old inhabitants fall on unheeding eye or ear. For myself, I never hear the words “old china” but my heart is moved, more than “with sound of a trumpet.” I breathe the battle afar and hurry to the fray, to return at times victorious with dainty trophies of war, and sometimes, alas, empty-handed, with the hanging head of sore disappointment and defeat. Sometimes the scent is poor and broken and you must ferret out the way to the lair; even with much trouble and diligence you cannot always learn at once and definitely the lurking-place of the porcelain treasures; you meet with reserve and a disinclination to reveal. Then comes stratagem to the fore. Learn to wheedle, to hint, to interrogate slyly, to blandly let the conversation drift—“muster all wiles with blandished parleys, feminine assaults, tongue batteries”—in short, vulg. dict., to “pump”—and work that pump with judgment, with craft, and with thoroughness. Moments of quickly repented expansiveness come to all mortals in country and in town, and in those rare moments of telling all they know, even reticent and secretive country people will give you many a china clue to follow.