So it is given in Boyne. A pun on the name is probably intended, but unless the issuer was a veritable cockney the animal represented was a rabbit. [Illustration] The Hare in combination with the Sun, having the date 1676 and the initials H N A, is still to be seen above the first-floor windows of a house, No. 71, on the east side of the Borough High Street; close to the sites of the three most famous Southwark inns, the Tabard, the White Hart, and the George; of which the last-named still exists in part at least, though doomed, I fear, to speedy destruction. This house was gutted by fire a few years ago, but the sign luckily escaped unharmed. It is now painted in various colours, which was the old method, and, I think, improves the effect. The solicitors of the property have kindly let me examine the deeds, and I have gathered from them the following particulars: In March, 1653, John Tarlton, citizen and brewer, left to his children two tenements in Southwark. In a mortgage of 1663 they are called ‘the Hare and the Three Pidgeons.’ In May, 1676, all, or nearly all, this part of Southwark was burnt down, the number of houses destroyed being, as stated in the _London Gazette_, about 600. A curious little pamphlet in my possession, licensed May 29, puts the number at nearly 500. On the title-page we are told that ‘St. Mary Overy’s Church and St. Thomas’s Hospital’ were ‘shattered and defaced,’ and everything ‘from Chain-Gate to the Counter on St. Margaret’s Hill on both sides the way burnt and demolished.’ I may note that on this occasion a fire-engine with leathern hose was first used, and seems to have been of great service in defending St. Thomas’s Hospital from the fire, as recorded in the _London Gazette_ for August 14, 1676. In the same month Nicholas Hare, grocer, surrendered to be cancelled a lease dated 1669, ‘of the messuage or tenement called the Hare and Sunne,’ the said messuage having been burnt in the fire; and the Tarltons let him the ground on building lease for eighty-one years from June, 1677. The rent had before been £24 a year, with a fine for renewal of £70; it was now reduced to £16 a year. The sign in question is therefore a punning one, having been put up by Nicholas Hare, grocer, after the great Southwark fire, as many signs of the same description had been put up in London a few years previously, after the great London fire. How the sun had got into combination with the hare one does not know.[39] In subsequent documents, down to the year 1748, when the house came into the possession of John Paris, it is described simply as the Hare. In his will, dated 1753, he speaks of ‘my dwelling-house near the George Inn, known by the sign of the Hare and Stirrup;’ and finally, in 1757, in a schedule of the fixtures, are mentioned ‘in the dining-room two large sign irons, and a large copper sign of the Hare and Stirrup;’ so the unpretentious stone bas-relief, though not taken down, appears