“‘Oh, heavens! to sip that most exquisite cup of delight was bliss almost too great for earth; a thousand years of rapture all concentrated into the space of a minute, as if the joy of all the world had been skimmed for my peculiar drinking, I should rather say imbibing, for to have swallowed that legend like an ordinary beverage without tasting every drop would have been a sacrilege.’” “No wonder you were keen for the spectacles!” I cried. “But I’ve never heard of Leigh Hunt’s spectacles! I don’t believe he ever wore them. You have to make allowance for the attitude my better half holds toward tea!” “No, my dear,” our hostess replied sweetly, “you know I love these things as much as you do.” It was true. Now, while we did not talk tea throughout all our little visit, we did eagerly examine the old tea-furniture. There was Delft, pottery, and porcelain of all sorts, marvelous tea-caddies, a collection of prints and caricatures of the Boston Tea Party. “There were other tea-parties over there in America,” our host explained; “you neglect them terribly! There was the ‘Tea-party’ of Philadelphia in 1773, the ‘Tea-party’ of Edenton in 1774 and the same year the ‘Tea-parties’ of Cumberland County and of Greenwich, New Jersey. I have them all in the library!” We saw the books before coming away. Not the least interesting was Chippendale’s “The Gentleman and Cabinet-Makers’ Director,” issued in London in 1762, with its designs for tea-tables and tea-chests, and the Hepplewhite book of 1787. Dr. Samuel Johnson was rated a prodigious tea-drinker in his day, “beyond all precedent.” We did not compete with his record, nor yet with that of Bishop Burnet, who thought nothing of sixteen cups of a morning, but we did not find our tea taste stinted, that delightful afternoon at Camberwell. Venus her myrtle, Phœbus has her Bays Tea both excels, which she vouchsafes to praise. We found Waller’s lines coming to mind many times afterward, when we had come to discover them in a dusty tome of 1662 which we found for a penny in a book-stall and added it to tea-ana! And what response to the memory of Camberwell adventures was evoked when, home again in our own country, we chanced upon Thomas’s “Massachusetts Spy” and read therein that touching farewell to tea! Farewell, the teaboard with its equipage Of cups and saucers, cream bucket and sugar tongs, The pretty tea-chest also lately stored With Hyson, Congo and best Double Fine.