china! Every cup, every jar in our china ingatherings, has the charm of
fantasy, visions of past life and beauty, though only imagined. I like
to think that the china I love has been warmly loved before—has been
made a cherished companion, been tenderly handled ere I took it to be my
companion and to care for it. It is much the same friendly affection
that I feel for an old well-read, half-worn book; the unknown hands
through which it has passed, the unseen eyes that have gazed on it, have
endeared it to me. This imagined charm exists in china if it be old,
though we know not a word of its past, save that it has a past and is
not fresh from the potter’s wheel and the kiln. The very haze of
uncertainty is favorable to the fancies of a dreamer; I summon past
owners from that shadowy hiding-place; weave romances out of that cloud;
build past dwelling-houses more quaint, more romantic than any in whose
windows I have gazed, whose threshold I have trodden in my real china
hunting. Victor Cousin says: “If beauty absent and dreamed of does not
affect you more than beauty present, you may have a thousand other
gifts, but not that of imagination.” If you have no imagination you may
have none of these china dreams—these “children of an idle brain,” but
you still may have china memories. Fair country sights does my old china
bring to my eyes; soft country sounds does it bring to my ears, the
sound of buzzing bees, of rustling branches, “the liquid lapse of
murmuring streams,” of rippling brooks where we dipped the old blue
crockery mugs and cups the day we found them, and drank the pure but
sun-warmed water. When I look at this queen’s-ware creamer, I hear the
sweet, clear, ear-thrilling notes of the meadow-lark, “in notes by
distance made more sweet”—who sang outside of the farm-house where I
first saw the dainty shell of china. Sweet scents, too, does the old
china bear. When I found that old yellow Wedgwood dish in the country
tavern, it was filled with tiny fragrant wild strawberries—I smell, nay,
I taste them still. That flaring-topped vase was full of sweet white
honeysuckle when I espied it in a farm-house window—I carried away the
scent of the honeysuckle when I bought the vase. This old mottled
stone-ware jug, with the hound handle, stood in the deep shade of a
stone wall by the side of a sunny hay-field when first it met my view.
It was filled with honest home-brewed beer for the hay-makers. We sat
fuming and sizzling in the hot sun, watching them spread and turn the
fragrant hay until the beer had all been drunk (and we did not have to
wait long), and we bore the jug off in triumph, breathing to us forever
the scent of new-mown hay with, to speak truthfully, a slight tinge of
stale beer.
A halo of “sweet Sabean odors” fairly envelops all family china. In
those blue and white Canton sugar-bowls, and in that great jar with the
red lacquered cover, my grandmother kept her fragrant spiced
rose-leaves—there are rose-leaves in them now. In that tall pitcher she
always placed the first lilac and cherry blooms—and lo! as I look at the
poor cracked thing, “sweet is the air with budding haws and white with
blossoming cherry-trees.” More prosaic and homely, but equally
memory-sweet, what a penetrating aroma of strong green tea rises out of
that copper-lustre teapot! What a burnt and bitter, but wholly
good-smelling steam arises from that old flip-mug, the steam from many a
quart of flip brewed from New England rum, and home-made beer, stirred
with the red-hot iron loggerhead.
[Illustration: Crown Derby Plate.]
Like Charles Lamb, I was born china-loving. “I am not conscious of a
time when china jars and saucers were introduced into my imagination.”
When I was a little child the dearest treasures of my doll’s house were
a small cup-plate of purest porcelain, delicately bordered with a
diagonal design of tiny berries and spike-shaped bachelor’s buttons and
fine lines of gold, and a nicked India china tea-caddy, cork-stoppered,
and filled with precious rose-water—rose-water of my grandmother’s own
make, distilled in the old rose-water still that stood, when unused, a
cumbrous and mysterious machine under the dusty eaves of the garret. I
suspect that still had been employed in early colonial days to
manufacture a less innocuous liquid than rose-water, but now only the
petals of the Queen of the Prairie, the sweet-brier, the cinnamon roses,
went into its innocent limbec; and its sweet-scented product was
intensified by the contents of one of the long, thin, gilt glass bottles
of ottar of roses that my great-uncle, Captain Royal, who “followed the
sea,” brought home in such vast numbers from China. One day there poured
out from the door of my doll’s house a penetrating fragrance of roses; I
peered within—the keen anguish of that moment fills me even now; the
tea-caddy had fallen—nay, had been knocked on my precious little plate,
and both were broken. There on her back, drenched with my cherished
rose-water, lay the iconoclast, my miserable maltese kitten, in mischief
still, pulling down with her sharp, wicked claws my proudest
masterpiece, a miniature chandelier of wire and glass beads over which I
had spent many a weary hour. I burst into a loud wail of hopeless
despair; the bedraggled kitten rushed frightened from my side, shedding
odors of Araby as she bounded away,
“An amber scent of odorous perfume
Her harbinger.”
Ah! never again, even at sight of housemaids’ broken spoils, have I felt
such heart-breaking grief. To this day, when I look back at the plate
here shown and the little coffee-cans of the blue Tournay sprigged set
which I now know to be Crown Derby, and to have been bought by Uncle
Royal in a sudden streak of extravagance (perhaps he, too, was
china-mad); to this day I grieve for their companion, the little broken
cup-plate, and again I smell the sweet, cloying fragrance of rose-water.
These old dark blue plates also tell a tale. They are known to us as
“the doctor’s pie-plates,” not from the comical figure of Dr. Syntax
with which they are decorated, but so called in derision. An old New
England physician, a pie-hater, stole, one Thanksgiving eve,
twenty-eight carefully made pies that his patient wife and daughters had
provided for his Thanksgiving guests. He rose stealthily in the dead of
night, threw lemon and apple, quince and cranberry, mince and
“Marlborough” pies to the pigs, and hid the blue pie-plates in an old
rat-nibbled, cobweb-filled, musty, dusty coach that had stood for half a
century in his carriagehouse, and in which his English grandmother had
journeyed in state throughout New England. Thirty years later, after his
death, at the destruction of the old coach, these hidden pie-plates were
found by his descendants. They are therefore not simply “good pieces of
blue,” they are ceramic monuments of the household tyranny of man.
Shall I ever forget my first view of my largest and choicest Washington
pitcher? It stood filled with dried grasses and pressed and varnished
autumn leaves, and painfully covered with an ignominious shell of
decalcomanie and scrap-book pictures, on a table in a lonely lighthouse.
Only by its shape did we know it, the old watermelon shape of Liverpool
ware. Not a vestige of its early decoration could be seen, but we bought
it as a hazard of fortune. Oh, the delight I felt when I reached home
and scraped off Pauline Hall’s smirking and high-colored countenance,
and saw with a thrill of friendly recognition the black-lined face of my
own solemn and immaculate Washington surmounting her full-blown, rosy
shoulders and scarlet and gold bodice. Never do I look at my fully
restored pitcher but I see him again, as then, with his dignified head
turned very much aside, as if sadly shocked at the position and dress he
found himself in.
The clear blue letters on these old Delft apothecary jars speak not to
me of the drugs and syrups, of the lohocks and electuaries that were
contained within them in olden times; they are abbreviations of various
Biblical proverbs, such as “Every fool will be meddling,” and “Let him
that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.” The little, ill-drawn
blue cherubs that decorate these jars seem always to wink and smirk
maliciously at me, and to hold their fat sides as though they were
thinking of the first time they gazed at me and jeered at me out of the
window of the gray old farm-house in Narragansett, as I stood entrapped
by the sudden crushing in of a peaked-roofed hen-house upon which I had
climbed to peer within a window at the hidden Delft treasures. There I
stood on broken eggs and piercing splinters for one hour, with only
distracted hens and scarcely less distracted thoughts for company, until
the owner of hen-house and Delft jars returned and kindly chopped me out
of my absurd and well-deserved stocks. Severe and unceasing monitors are
my old apothecary jars.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: Delft Apothecary Jars.]
When I stick gillyflowers and clove-pinks in the pierced tops of these
three-legged India china “posy-holders,” I am, like Marjorie Fleming,
“all primmed up with Majestick Pride”—the honest pride of a successful
china-finder who has snatched her prize from before the very face of a
dozen other collectors. These “posy-holders” stood for forty years on
the high-towering mantel-tree of a country parlor, a parlor that was
viewed yearly by scores of inquisitive and curiosity-seeking summer
visitors, visitors too dull-visioned to recognize these china treasures.
Perhaps the high-shelved station of the china, a foot only from the
ceiling, helped to hide them. Perhaps the gruesome row of oval silvered
disks that stood in their company, tarnished coffin-plates bearing the
names of past and dead dwellers in that home, may have chilled and
repelled investigation. Perhaps the scarlet, blue, and gold dragons and
shrimps on the posy-holders were dulled by the greater glories of their
surroundings, for this parlor shone resplendent with glowing color. The
walls had been painted by a travelling artist in the early part of this
century, and lavish was his fancy and his sense of color. Above the high
black mantel-shelf a yellow ochre sun threw his rays over vermillion and
purple clouds. These rays of light were gilded and curved in various
directions, and gave Phœbus the appearance of a good-tempered, smiling
octopus, withal somewhat intoxicated. At either side of the fireplace
sprung a great palm-tree that bore at the base of a spreading cluster of
leaves luscious bunches of great hanging pineapples. Around one tree a
frightful serpent coiled, his striped folds most beautifully diversified
with gilded spots. Behind the other tree lurked a crouching tiger. On
the plastered wall were painted two portraits with fine simulated gold
frames, apparently held in place by heavy cord and tassels; one was of
George Washington, the other the past owner of all these glories. It was
curious to see the marked and comic likeness a fair young daughter of
the house, the village school-mistress, bore to the hard-faced,
non-perspectived old daub of a grandfather on the wall; had you dressed
her in a brass-buttoned blue coat and a high stock, she would have been
far more like the portrait than most portraits are like their originals.
One large space was decorated with a full-passengered coach with four
prancing horses; the other bore a marine view—fierce waves, and a
strangely rigged brig, with gilded cannon, and fine flags and pennants
all blowing stiffly against the wind that filled the sails. A steamboat,
too, sailed these waters blue—the greatest triumph of the painter’s art.
Robert Fulton’s invention was in its infancy when this steamboat was
evolved, and it was plainly constructed from the artist’s imagination.
The cranky hull bore two brick chimneys; it rested on crossbars like a
wagon, and had four great wheels that sat well up out of the water. The
floor of this room was painted a dull drab color, and in brilliant
yellow was displayed a diagram of the solar system, planets, moons, and
orbits, sadly worn and defaced, however, by the footsteps of three
generations of New Englanders.
Do you wonder that the china posy-holders were overlooked in all this
blaze of glory? I recount the gaudy decorations with grateful praise.
Through them my treasures stood, ever “eye-sweet and fair,” but
unnoticed, for years, humbly awaiting my china-loving and china-spying
vision.
These dainty egg-shell cups and saucers have also their memory, their
lesson—a word softly spoken but clear; they were once owned by two
silver-haired “antient maides” of Chippendale elegance and Pilgrim
blood, who lived under the moss-covered, decaying rooftree of a pallid,
gaunt, old colonial home in New England. These “last leaves on the tree”
kept their dainty, shallow, apse-shaped china closets in a state of
snowy purity, of precise and unvarying order, of unspotted
contamination, which might be taken as an emblem of their narrow, pure,
and monotonous lives. No thick, substantial modern wares, no gayly
painted crockery, no vessels of common clay, stood on their well-ordered
and softly shining shelves, just as no modern notions, no knowledge of
the common, the evil things of life, had ever entered their simple
minds, had ever shocked their fair souls. Fragile, graceful, antiquated,
pale in decoration, were their weakly sprigged, lavender-bordered,
delicately fluted cups; looking like their own softly wrinkled faces,
their meagre, bent figures, their slender hands. Worn was the gilt on
the china, faded was the furniture of their rooms, as ill-health had
worn their gentle spirits. Rather scantily filled were their china
shelves, as were thin and few their garments, as was sparsely filled
their larder. Deep green shadows fell on the glass doors and white
shelves of their china closets from the thick-branched old lilacs that
close-screened each small-paned window, from the dark century-old cedars
that overhung their home; death and loneliness and scanty means had
shadowed their lives. My pure, dignified, and silent old cousins, no
sweetly-perfumed, softly-tinted, strong-growing blossoms of New England
life were you, but rather the sad, white, scentless “life everlasting”
that waved like summer snow-drifts over your own sterile, rock-filled
fields. These fragile porcelain emblems of your colorless life shall not
be carelessly handled and rudely gazed at in their new home, but,
close-hidden away in an old apple-wood beaufet which once stood beside
your virginal china closets, shall forever teach to me the lesson of
contentment, simplicity, and resignation which you showed in your gentle
lives, the lesson which through your old china still lives—the lesson of
peace and rest.
[Illustration: Copper-Lustre Pitcher.]
A halo of mysterious ghost-seeing, an eternal radiance of poesy,
surrounds this copper-lustre pitcher. We found this irradiated pitcher
when we went a-spinet-hunting. We found the ghost also, a tall, pale,
terrifying apparition, who stealthily entered our room at midnight as we
slept in the old Pardon tavern, who mysteriously and quietly carried off
our gowns, but who proved in the cold disillusionizing daylight to be
our landlady’s daughter, an amateur dressmaker of unbounded ambition and
few resources. And our poet! we found him also, a unique and untutored
son of the gods, a rare product of New England soil. We prosaically
hired this Yankee Walt Whitman to drive us to the Maybee farm—the house
which we had been assured held both china and spinet. Our
dearly-remembered poet was a tall, wiry New Englander, whose only
visible attire was a moth-eaten fur hat, a woollen shirt, a pair of
heavy boots, and faded overalls, held in place by a single suspender. He
looked too thinly clad for the raw spring weather, but seemed perfectly
comfortable and contented in his light clothing. Poet-like, his hair was
long. Four little wintry curls blew out from under the old hat. We had
been warned that he did not call himself a farmer, but proudly avowed
and named himself a poet; and it was hinted that he was a little “luny.”
He had begun his rhyming career with the composition of epitaphs for all
the village inhabitants, both living and dead; and from thence had
advanced to the constant use of rhymes in every-day life and hence had
acquired the name of “Rhyming Darius.” He “lisped in numbers for the
numbers came;” and proudly did he display his God-given talent to us
prosy city folks. He also combined with his vocation as poet the
additional talent of employing intensely legal forms of speech; for he
had at an early period of his life been a witness in some country
trespass case, and had since then always spent a day “in court,”
whenever the rare days of idleness of a New England farmer would permit.
As a result, he always cross-questioned everyone with whom he had any
conversation, and adopted, as far as he could remember, a lawyer’s
phraseology and legal terms. He had a wily manner of evading questions,
and seldom gave a direct answer; so between questions and answers we
held “open court” all the way to the Maybee farm.
Our poet also made a strange introduction of the letter “u” into
words—which use he evidently regarded as something extremely eloquent
and scholarly, but which produced some very astonishing variations in
our vernacular speech. He was much excited at the nocturnal abstraction
of our gowns and he poured forth a perfect volley of rhymed questions
upon the subject to us as he drove, seated sidewise, fixing us “with his
glittering eye:”
“Why didn’t she apply to ye purs-u-nal
An’ ask ye fur the garment?
Did she retain the artucle
Long enough to bring a warrant?
Did she take it with malice of forethought
Or unpre-med-ure-tated?
Did she terrure-fy ye very bad
A-purloinin’ as ye stated?
What air ye goin’ to do?
Did her mother know it too?
Why didn’t ye holler out?
An’ ask her what’s she’s about?”
At last, to stop his flood of inquiry, we began to question him, to draw
him out about the spinet and china.
“Do you know the Maybees well?”
“Wall—I may perhaps assert
And assure-vure-rate I do;
At any rate I know him
And I s’pose I know her too.”
“Is it an old farm, and an old house?”
“It ain’t so old as some,
And it’s a little older ’n others.
The farm ’s older ’n the house;
It used to be my brother’s.”
“How long have you known them?”
“Oh—quite an in-ture-val,
But I ain’t known ’m all my life;
I’ve known him sence I was two year old,
And a leetle longer his wife.”
“Do you know whether they have an old spinet?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute
If you’ll tell me what’s a spinet?”
“It is like a little old-fashioned piano. Have they got such a one? Is
it old? Is it small? Describe it to us.”
“They ‘ve the funniest thing you ever see;
It’s just as cur-u-ous as it can be;
How to dure-scribe it just beats me;
Spinet’s the name for it down to a T.
It ain’t so big as some pianures,
And it ain’t so small as othures;
’Tain’t so old as some you’d see,
And ’tain’t so new as it might be;
That is all that I can say.
I heard old Maybee tell one day
He’d a mus-ure-cal com-bure-nation
He’d be glad to sell for a very small sum;
’Twas as old and mean
As any he’d seen,
And he’d like to sell it, he says,
Before it drops to pieces.”
We looked at each other in amazement at this strange specimen of Yankee
humanity—that is, we did it whenever his gaze was averted long enough to
give us any chance to look at each other. We sank back in despair of
ever receiving a definite description of the spinet, and above all of
any china—that most indescribable of country possessions. We feebly
tried to parry him with some of the skill which he himself displayed,
but failed ignominiously under the scathing sharpness of this “lawyer”
of thirty years’ experience. We finally answered his rhyming questions
with as much directness and truth as the chief witness in a murder
trial. As we alighted from the wagon and were about to enter the Maybee
door, Darius pulled me back by the sleeve and whispered:
“Ye mustn’t mind Miss Maybee
If ye find her a leetle cross;
She ain’t at all e-lab-ure-ate,
Any more than my old horse.
She won’t show any man-ures
When you ask to see her pianure.”
A sharp-featured young woman advanced to meet us. Her hair bore two
partings, an inch apart, and the middle lock was strained painfully
back. Her face was curiously mottled with yellow patches which showed
plainly that dyspepsia and biliousness had marked her for their own. She
looked so sour, so sharp, so devoid of “man-ures” that we quailed
visibly before her keen black eye. What new specimen of humanity had we
here? Into what world was our China and spinet-hunting carrying us?
We began the conversation very mildly by saying that we had heard that
Mrs. Maybee had some china that she wished to sell.
“Then you’ve heard a lie,” the acrid voice broke in.
“But surely we have heard that you have a piano to sell?”
“Well, I ain’t. I’ve got a musical combination, but I ain’t so awful
anxious to sell it.”
For minutes we stood there, facing this resentful being, who showed no
desire to have us seat ourselves, while we pleaded, we praised, we
cajoled, we apologized, and we questioned, until, at last, she allowed
us to see her precious spinet. We entered the gloomy “best room” where
it stood, gave one glance at it, and sank on the haircloth sofa. It was
a _melodeon_—a forlorn, broken-down, old _melodeon_—to which some
farm-tinker had added an oblong frame strung with catgut and wire
strings, in the apparent hope of forming some instrument of the nature
of an Æolian-harp.
Tears of disappointment fairly sprang to our eyes; but the contrast, the
revulsion of feeling, the sense of the ludicrous, was so keen, that we
gave way to hysterical laughter; we could not suppress it. Where, alas!
were our “manners?” I was the first to recover my self-possession. I
turned to Mrs. Maybee, who stood before us speechless with angry
astonishment, and said pacifically: “You were very good to let us see
it. It is not quite what we expected to find. It is so much newer than
an old spinet! I fear my sister could not afford to buy it, as she has
one piano already. It is very curious and very ingenious, and no doubt
you will sell it to someone.” We were walking slowly toward the open
door in the hope of immediate escape; but we were not to escape so
easily, not without punishment for our adventurous raid. As we drew
back, Mrs. Maybee advanced; and it seemed for a while that we should be
obliged to buy the old melodeon and take it off with us. But I seized
upon a diversion, a godsend, in the shape of a row of window-plants in
the kitchen. One fine geranium flourished in this “copper-lustre”
pitcher, which had had a hole knocked in the bottom, to permit the water
to drain out. I immediately began to admire that geranium, and offered
Mrs. Maybee a dollar for the pitcher and plant. This diverted her mind
from the unfortunate “spinet;” and after much sharp talk and bargaining
we paid her one dollar and seventy-five cents for the geranium and
pitcher, rushed from her inhospitable door, and drove away with our
poet. “The True Story of the Life, Temper, and Adventures of Orvilla
Maybee,” related to us in legal verse by “Rhyming Darius” on our
homeward drive, made us wonder that we escaped unharmed from that New
England vixen.
So our broken lustre pitcher was all that we had to carry home with us
from our “spinet hunt.” And I will close this little tale of New England
experience with a simple statement of the cost of the pitcher and the
geranium (which died when transplanted).
Two fares to Pardon and return $4 00
Bill for supper, bed, and breakfast for two 1 50
Wagon, poetry, and legal advice 1 00
Paid Mrs. Maybee for pitcher 1 75
—————
Total cost of pitcher $8 25
As I have since seen a fac-simile of our pitcher (only whole and
unbroken) in a bric-a-brac shop, ticketed $2, we cannot consider the
trip financially successful; though, truth to tell, it was far more so
than many another expedition we have made. But a golden lustre, the
memory of our legal poet, englamours forever in our eyes our copper
pitcher. When we look at it we hear again the strident voice, the
bizarre pronunciation, the voluble rhymes of our poet of the soil, our
Darius, as he exclaimed in amazement:
“Ye don’t hang ’em on the wall,
Them cracked old kitchen dishes!
An’ keep a frac-tured pitcher
As if ’t was act-ure-ly precious!
They say that city folks
Is mighty extrav-ure-gant,
But with such test-ure-mony
I’m willin’ to swear they ain’t.
There ain’t a party in this town
So stingy an’ such a non-com
As to hang that pitcher on the wall,
Lookin’ ’s if ’t was jest goin’ ter fall,
An’ the hole showin’ in the botturm.”
Many ghosts has our china hunting revealed to us; the ghosts of the
past, the visions and dreams that never become realities, the inexorable
fate, the sad kismet of New England life. Such was the story of the
house of Hartington, a story sadly typical of many New England homes; a
story which the sight of these little lettered and escutcheoned cups
always retells to us.
A description had been given to us of an old town with old houses and
old people and old china, and after a gloomy night in a hideous country
hotel we started out to find some townsman of whom we could hire a horse
and carriage of some or any sort to carry us to Rindge and Anthony
Hartington’s house—the oldest house of all.
A thin, auburn-haired, freckle-faced Yankee, about twenty-one years old,
answered our questions with the greatest interest, and finally offered
us the use of his own horse and open wagon for the whole day for two
dollars. “And I’ll drive fer ye, too,” he added, with enthusiasm. “Ye’d
never find old Hartington’s if ye took the hoss yerself, an’ I do’ ‘now
as I can neither, without some pretty tall huntin’ and questionin’.”