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.