According to Brand, the Spanish morris was danced at puppet shows by a person habited like a Moor. Strutt, in his ‘Sports and Pastimes of the English People,’ connects it with the fandango. Some curious dancing figures carved in wood once formed part of the decorations in the mediæval town-hall of Munich; the series was known as the Maurscha tanntz. In England the dance derived from the Moors seems to have been grafted on to the rustic May games and sports, which perhaps were falling into disuse. The characters in the English morris-dance were usually Maid Marian (a boy dressed up in girl’s clothes), Robin Hood, Friar Tuck, the Fool, Tom the piper with pipe and tabor, and the hobby-horse. A rare pamphlet[9] of 1609 tells us about a morris-dance in Herefordshire, where the united ages of the twelve dancers were supposed to amount to twelve hundred years; but, unfortunately, it does not give details of the performance. Waldron, in his edition of the ‘Sad Shepherd,’ 1783, p. 255, mentions seeing a company of morris-dancers from Abington, at Richmond in Surrey, in the summer of 1783. They appeared to be making a kind of annual circuit. Even so late as the time of the Queen’s coronation, there was morris-dancing of a kind in Hyde Park, as recorded by a writer in _Notes and Queries_. One still sees occasionally on May Day, in the less-frequented streets of London, a dance performed by two or three sweeps to the sound of fife and drum. They are dressed fantastically; one of them is, as a rule, half concealed in a frame covered with leaves and flowers, and is called a Jack-in-the-green. They are generally accompanied by a woman. These may be considered to a certain extent descendants of the morris-dancers, and their black faces happen to carry out the old idea. Over the doorway of No. 13, Clare Street, at the corner of Vere Street, Clare Market, is a stone sign carved in low relief, which represents Two Negroes’ heads facing each other, with the date 1715 and initials W S M. The house is occupied by a baker; its destruction is imminent, should Government adopt the plan of the London County Council for a new street from the Strand to Holborn. The neighbourhood is now squalid, and many of the buildings have lately been cleared away, but we know that in the seventeenth century it was well inhabited. I may remark, as a curious coincidence, that the continuation of Clare Street towards Drury Lane is called Blackmoor--in old maps Blackamore--Street. Seventeenth-century trade-tokens with signs of negro heads are in existence; one was issued from Drury Lane, and is thus described by Boyne: _O._ THOMAS.HAYTON.IN.DRVRY = A negro’s head. _R._ LANE.HIS.HALFE.PENNY = An arched crown. The following advertisement, which appeared in a _London Gazette_ for 1695, has a distinctly local flavour: