able to reproduce them.  It cost more than the tear-jug, as the dealer said there was not another plate just like it in the world.  He said there was much false Henri II ware around, but that the genuineness of this piece was unquestionable.  He showed me its pedigree, or its history, if you please; it was a document which traced this plate’s movements all the way down from its birth—­showed who bought it, from whom, and what he paid for it—­from the first buyer down to me, whereby I saw that it had gone steadily up from thirty-five cents to seven hundred dollars.  He said that the whole Ceramic world would be informed that it was now in my possession and would make a note of it, with the price paid. [Figure 8]

There were Masters in those days, but, alas—­it is not so now.  Of course the main preciousness of this piece lies in its color; it is that old sensuous, pervading, ramifying, interpolating, transboreal blue which is the despair of modern art.  The little sketch which I have made of this gem cannot and does not do it justice, since I have been obliged to leave out the color.  But I’ve got the expression, though.

However, I must not be frittering away the reader’s time with these details.  I did not intend to go into any detail at all, at first, but it is the failing of the true ceramiker, or the true devotee in any department of brick-a-brackery, that once he gets his tongue or his pen started on his darling theme, he cannot well stop until he drops from exhaustion.  He has no more sense of the flight of time than has any other lover when talking of his sweetheart.  The very “marks” on the bottom of a piece of rare crockery are able to throw me into a gibbering ecstasy; and I could forsake a drowning relative to help dispute about whether the stopple of a departed Buon Retiro scent-bottle was genuine or spurious.

Many people say that for a male person, bric-a-brac hunting is about as robust a business as making doll-clothes, or decorating Japanese pots with decalcomanie butterflies would be, and these people fling mud at the elegant Englishman, Byng, who wrote a book called the bric-A-brac Hunter, and make fun of him for chasing around after what they choose to call “his despicable trifles”; and for “gushing” over these trifles; and for exhibiting his “deep infantile delight” in what they call his “tuppenny collection of beggarly trivialities”; and for beginning his book with a picture of himself seated, in a “sappy, self-complacent attitude, in the midst of his poor little ridiculous bric-a-brac junk shop.”

It is easy to say these things; it is easy to revile us, easy to despise us; therefore, let these people rail on; they cannot feel as Byng and I feel—­it is their loss, not ours.  For my part I am content to be a brick-a-bracker and a ceramiker—­more, I am proud to be so named.  I am proud to know that I lose my reason as immediately in the presence of a rare jug with an illustrious mark on the bottom of it, as if I had just emptied that jug.  Very well; I packed and stored a part of my collection, and the rest of it I placed in the care of the Grand Ducal Museum in Mannheim, by permission.  My Old Blue China Cat remains there yet.  I presented it to that excellent institution.