oted girls of the Alliance, and the talk falls on the
old times.

The art collection would give its admirers shivers to-day, but it
excited only happy complacency then. The mood of the hour was not
critical. The homes of the Fairport gentry held innumerable oil copies
of the great masters of different degrees of merit, which they loaned
secure of welcome; with them came family treasures so long held in
reverence that their artistic value (coldly considered) had been lost to
comparison, and the gems of accomplished amateurs who painted flowers on
china cups, or of rising young artists who had not as yet risen beyond
the circle of trusting friends in town.

In general, the donors' expectation of gratitude was justified, but even
so early as 1881 there were limits to artistic credulity; and some
offerings drove the club president, Miss Claudia Loraine, and the club
secretary, Miss Emma Hopkins, to "the coal hold." This was a wee closet
under the stairs, where the coal scuttles were ranged, until they should
fare forth to replenish the "base burners" which warmed the Museum home.
In real life the name of the Museum's lodgings was Harness Block, and
Mr. Harness had proffered the cause of art two empty stores, formerly a
fish market and a grocery. As there was no private office (only a wire
cage), when Miss Hopkins felt the need of frank speech she signaled
Claudia to the coal hole.

She was closeted with her thus on the morning of the second day. The
subject of the conference was the last assault on the nerves of the
committee, perpetrated by the Miller twins--not in person, but with
their china. The china, itself, had the outward semblance of ordinary
blue earthen ware of a cheap grade; but the Miller twins were convinced
(on the testimony of their dear old minister, who never told a lie in
his life, and who had heard the Millers' grandmother say--and everybody
knows that _she_ was a saint on earth, and she was ninety years old at
the time, and would she be likely to lie almost on her dying bed?--you
might call it her dying bed, averred Miss Miller, since she was
bedridden for two years before her death, on that same old four-poster
bedstead which belonged to her mother, and at last died on it) that the
blue ware had been the property of George the Third, had been sold and
was on board the ship with the tea which was rifled in Boston Harbor.
They had insisted in pasting these royal claims upon the china in the
blackest a