With the furniture of Hepplewhite we find the three section bookcase desk in vogue, and the pull-over top (tambour) which was ancestor to the modern roll-top. The Hepplewhite desks are in great variety and of much beauty and practical utility as well. Sheraton included in his desks all the forms brought into fashion by Hepplewhite or modified by him. All these various periods were reflected in American desks, some of them with local modifications and variations. CHAPTER XVI CHELSEA Old Chelsea--with what associations is the name endowed! Hither came the wits--Smollett, Steele, Swift, Horace Walpole, and others of the _monde_. Those were the days when Chelsea was still a village of the eighteenth century, boasting of Ranelagh and its gaieties on the one hand, and Cremorne Gardens on the other. Here was the manor Henry VIII had given to Catherine Parr when Chelsea was completely rural; in Walpole’s time it was just beginning to be truly suburban, while now it is so integral a part of London that it might long ago have had its identity swallowed up but for the perpetuation of its literary, artistic, and historical atmosphere by Carlyle and his circle and by Whistler and his. The fifteen years from 1750 to 1765 comprised the period of old Chelsea’s social heyday, though the aftermath was not without its distinctly brilliant though somewhat irascible flashes. These were years demanding fine things for the fashionables. Horace Walpole and others had stirred up the passion for chinaware and the English porcelain and pottery-manufacturers were kept busy not only to supply the demand but to meet the exacting quality of that demand, which called for perfection in _fabrique_. With this in mind it is not at all strange that some enterprising potter with a provident eye to business should have decided on establishing a porcelain factory at Chelsea. Just when this venture was established, history has neglected to disclose, but it must have been somewhere around 1740. We do know that the Chelsea porcelain-works were already celebrated for their wares in 1745. Some students of ceramics believe a very early date should be assigned to Chelsea productions. It is even possible that porcelain was being made in the village as early as 1682, the year in which was begun the old hospital for invalid soldiers, designed by Sir Christopher Wren. Of course as Oriental porcelain had been introduced into England some fifty years before that--in 1631, to be exact--it is likely enough that works for the purpose of imitating it were established in Chelsea. Horace Walpole made note of very early “specimens of Chelsea blue-and-white.” Perhaps these were the sort of crude porcelain which Dr. Martin Lister referred to in an account of his visit to France, in 1695, wherein he mentions the superiority of the “Potterie of St. Clou” over the “gomroon ware” of England, although he observes that the English were “better masters of