disheartening to her, as regards not only the cost, but the blow it is to her to discover the carelessness and deception of, perhaps, a favourite maid, who would have been neither careless nor deceiving had she had to come to her mistress for every single glass over and above the few she had at her command. Nothing has altered more in the last twenty years, both in character and price, than glass and china, and nothing shows the taste of the mistress of the house more than her plates and tumblers. No one has now any excuse for having ugly things, because good glass is as cheap as bad, and good china can be had by any one who has the taste to choose it, and the knowledge where to go and buy each separate thing. Granted that we have selected our saucepans, our basins, and other necessary things known to any one, and to be chosen from a list either sent for from Maple or Whiteley--for Maple, I have discovered, issues these lists too--and which, it seems to me, would only be waste of paper and time for me to enumerate here, we must, of course, now proceed to think about our dinner set. The best everyday one I know of is a species of plain white china supplied by Maple, and which has the owner’s monogram on the edge of the dish. These plates and dishes are so extremely cheap that when I say they are 2_s._ a dozen I scarcely expect to be believed, and even now I cannot help thinking there must be a mistake; but the rest of the service was equally inexpensive, and I really do not think I am making an error in giving this as the price. I invariably have my soup-tureens, sauceboats, and vegetable dishes made without handles--a pretty, rather oval shape, with the monogram on the side and on the top of the cover. There is nothing makes a table look worse than chipped or mended crockery; and how often has quite a nice service been spoiled by the fact that either the handles were knocked off and smashed, or else they were riveted on. Now if we have no handles or ornamental knobs to be knocked off, the service lasts three times as long as it otherwise would. The plain white service also insures cleanliness and absence of greasy or black finger-marks, and one never tires of this as one does of the elaborate patterns and colours some people prefer, and which are extremely difficult to match once the manufacturers have broken up the design.