“They carve pear-wood because it is so soft, and dye it brown, and call it me” said an old oak cabinet, with a chuckle.

“That is not so painful; it does not vulgarise you so much as the cups they paint to-day and christen after me,” said a Carl Theodor cup subdued in hue, yet gorgeous as a jewel.

“Nothing can be so annoying as to see common gimcracks aping me,” interposed the princess in the pink shoes.

“They even steal my motto, though it is Scripture,” said a Trauerkrug of Regensburg in black-and-white.

“And my own dots they put on plain English china creatures!” sighed the little white maid of Nymphenburg.

“And they sell hundreds and thousands of common china plates, calling them after me, and baking my saints and my legends in a muffle of to-day; it is blasphemy!” said a stout plate of Gubbio, which in its year of birth had seen the face of Maestro Giorgio.

“That is what is so terrible in these bric-a-brac places,” said the princess of Meissen.  “It brings one in contact with such low, imitative creatures; one really is safe nowhere nowadays unless under glass at the Louvre or South Kensington.”

“And they get even there,” sighed the gres de Flandre.  “A terrible thing happened to a dear friend of mine, a terre cuite of Blasius (you know the terres cuites of Blasius date from 1560).  Well, he was put under glass in a museum that shall be nameless, and he found himself set next to his own imitation born and baked yesterday at Frankfort, and what think you the miserable creature said to him, with a grin?  ‘Old Pipeclay,’ that is what he called my friend, ’the fellow that bought me got just as much commission on me as the fellow that bought you, and that was all that he thought about.  You know it is only the public money that goes!’ And the horrid creature grinned again till he actually cracked himself.  There is a Providence above all things, even museums.”

“Providence might have interfered before, and saved the public money,” said the little Meissen lady with the pink shoes.

“After all, does it matter?” said a Dutch jar of Haarlem, “All the shamming in the world will not make them us!”

“One does not like to be vulgarised,” said the Lady of Meissen, angrily.

“My maker, the Krabbetje,[1] did not trouble his head about that,” said the Haarlem jar, proudly.  “The Krabbetje made me for the kitchen, the bright, clean, snow-white Dutch kitchen, well-nigh three centuries ago, and now I am thought worthy the palace; yet I wish I were at home; yes, I wish I could see the good Dutch vrouw, and the shining canals, and the great green meadows dotted with the kine.”

[Footnote 1:  Jan Asselyn, called Krabbetje, the Little Crab, born 1610, master-potter of Delft and Haarlem.]

“Ah! if we could all go back to our makers!” sighed the Gubbio plate, thinking of Giorgio Andreoli and the glad and gracious days of the Renaissance:  and somehow the words touched the frolicsome souls of the dancing jars, the spinning teapots, the chairs that were playing cards; and the violin stopped its merry music with a sob, and the spinet sighed—­thinking of dead hands.