Half a century ago, when little girls went to school they carried with them the inevitable pin poppet, some of which receptacles for pins and other similar sundries were of wood, but many were brass; some met with among old metal curios are quite handsomely decorated. Another indispensable object is the button, so many of which are of metal, many decorative, some inscribed, and others ornamented with portraits. There are little brass sleeve-links, worn in Tudor days, to be met with, and some curious brass studs which were worn by men in the shirt fronts of the early Georgian period. There are clasps of purses and books and casket mounts of brass, some of which date back to the fifteenth century. The older mounts of purses, so-called, would be more correctly described as the mounts of gipcieres; the gipciere was a kind of pouch formerly worn at the girdle; the name is also spelled _gipser_: "A _gipser_ all of silk Hung at his girdle white as morné silk." Chaucer. Sometimes the mounts were inscribed with mottoes; one found in Brooks' Wharf, London, believed to be of fourteenth-century workmanship, is inscribed "CREATOREM CELI ET TERRE ET IN IESVM." Other objects in brass are girdle ends, some of which are shaped like acorns and others are of ivy-leaf design. Among ornamental bronzes which can be worn, and in larger sizes hung upon the wall, there are plaques, many of the earliest being copied from antique gems. Plaquettes in bronze were common in the sixteenth century. Arms and Armour. A volume might well be taken up with describing mediæval arms and armour. It is true iron and steel are the chief metals in the making of weapons, but brass and bronze are closely allied with some of the armaments of war. Many of the small mediæval cannon were of brass, and not a few of the guns, or "hand cannon," were of that metal.