Without using unsightly stone-ware, it is yet possible to procure for every-day service pretty crockery that is less easily broken than the delicate French china. In purchasing a dinner set which is to do steady duty, the housewife must be guided by prudential as well as artistic considerations. She can find what is known as the English Dresden and one or two other kinds of china which combine pretty designs with durability of material, and are not very expensive.
Often there are included in a dinner set a full dozen each of tea, breakfast coffee, and after-dinner coffee cups; and sometimes the set can be purchased to greater advantage by taking them all. Frequently, too, the dealer will not break the set. Unless either or both of these conditions should prevail, there is little gain for the housekeeper in taking the whole set. Usually she already has a fair number of cups and saucers, and in any case she would not need as many as the set comprises. By a little search it is often practicable to pick up a broken set, consisting of a certain number of plates, vegetable and meat dishes, and in this day there is no obligation upon one to have everything to match. The principal pieces should be alike, if possible; but the fish, salad, dessert, and fruit plates may all be of different designs, and be none the worse on that account.
Her dinner dishes purchased, the young mistress may congratulate herself. There is no other equally heavy pull ahead of her in the line of china. Now she may at her leisure pick up her pretty harlequin set of cups and saucers, her dessert dishes, her large cake and bread plates, and her small bread and butter plates, her fish set, her chocolate-pot, her bouillon-cups, her nappies, her individual dishes for shirred eggs, for scalloped fish, oysters, or chicken, and the dozen of other dainty fancies with which the china shops are crowded. Her accumulations will be all the dearer to her because many of them have been procured at the cost of a little personal sacrifice.
When one begins to price cut glass she is generally wofully discouraged. The cost of the plainest cut is very high if the glass is heavy, and a little experience soon teaches the housekeeper that it is very poor economy to buy the thin glass for every-day use. It will often break in washing in spite of the most careful handling, and a slight blow to it means fracture. Now that pressed glass comes in such pretty patterns, it may be made to do duty for common use, and is so attractive that no one need be ashamed to put it on her table.
"You should see my new glass dish," said a young housekeeper, gleefully. "It cost me just seventy-nine cents, and when you set it on handsome damask it looks like the real cut. Of course you can't put two cheap things together, but my table-cloths are all so good that I can afford to set a few imitations on them."
The advantages of this heavy glass are seen less in the dishes, large and small, than in the goblets or tumblers that are in daily use. Here the havoc is dreadful when the glass is of the egg-shell species. Cheap though it often is, it does not pay to purchase it when its destruction is merely a question of a few days or weeks.
LINEN AND SILVER
