A VAST amount of property in London is owned by the City Companies, and houses which belong to them are as a rule marked by their arms or crest. These were formerly carved in stone, and a few fine old specimens still remain, similar in style to the ordinary sculptured house signs. Sometimes, no doubt, a citizen put up on his own house, as a sign, the arms of the guild of which he was a member; and this seems to have been the case with the stone bas-relief of Adam and Eve, which was formerly imbedded in the front wall of No. 52, Newgate Street, a house now rebuilt. Eve appeared handing the fatal apple to Adam, the tree in the centre, round its stem the serpent twining; at the upper corners were the initials L S, below the date 1669. It represented the arms of the Fruiterers’ Company, but I have not been able to discover that the house had ever belonged to them. At Milton next Sittingbourne, on a public-house formerly the Fruiterers’ Arms, now misnamed the Waterman’s Arms, is a similar carved sign, one of the few I have found out of London. Beneath is inscribed ‘The Fruiterers.’ The design appears on a seventeenth-century trade-token issued from Rosemary Lane. The arms of the Fruiterers’ Company, as blazoned in Hatton’s ‘New View of London’ (1708), are: azure, on a mount in base vert, the tree of Paradise environed with the serpent between Adam and Eve, all proper. Motto, ‘Deus dat incrementum.’ What Ruskin calls the ‘fig-tree angle’ of the Doge’s Palace, Venice, is adorned by a famous piece of sculpture representing this subject. The Elephant and Castle is the crest of the Cutlers’ Company. A stone bas-relief representing it is to be seen on the east side of Bell Savage Yard, Ludgate Hill, having been placed there nearly thirty years ago, some time after the famous old inn was levelled with the ground. It formerly stood over the gateway below the sign of the Bell. In 1568 John Craythorne gave the reversion of this inn, and after his death the house called the Rose in Fleet Street, to the Cutlers’ Company for ever, on condition that two exhibitions to the Universities, and certain sums to poor prisoners, should be paid to them out of the estate. A portrait of Mrs. Craythorne hangs in Cutlers’ Hall. In mediæval times the elephant was commonly depicted with a castle on its back. It was then the heraldic emblem of Rome, and appears as such on the floor of the cathedral at Siena.