Still more popular than the stars of heaven is the animal world on the tavern sign. The ark of Noah itself and all it contained, every creeping and flying thing, was welcome over the tavern door in those days when men and beast, often living under the same roof, as in the divine inn of Bethlehem, were nearer to each other than they are now. Nothing less than a tavern zoölogy could give a complete enumeration, which we prefer to avoid. We will choose only a few which were especially dear to the people. First of all, naturally, the house companions,--the cat, “Le Chat qui dort” which found a quiet resting-place for her old days in the Musée Carnavalet in Paris; the dog, popular in sport-loving England; the ox and the donkey, even an elegant mule we find in the “Auberge de la Mule” at Avignon, praised by Abraham Gölnitz, the Baedeker of the seventeenth century, as a “logement élégant et agréable.” We have already met the cock in Rome of old, on the Forum, in Holland we see him occasionally as a cavalier in high boots. The dove, the symbol of the Holy Ghost, decorates the “Gasthäuser zum Geiste” one of which stood in the old Strassburg and saw the remarkable interview between the young Goethe and the poet Herder. Finally the stork, the true sign of German “Gemütlichkeit”; the one in Basel was honored by the visit of Victor Hugo: “Je me suis logé à la Cigogne, et de la fenêtre où je vous écris, je vois dans une petite place deux jolies fontaines côte à côte, l’une du quinzième siècle, l’autre du seizième.” To the Philistine the strange animals of foreign distant lands had a greater attraction still. In every modern “zoo” you will always find a larger public before the monkey house than before the cage of the lion or even the elephant, whose dignity and wisdom find fewer admirers than does the foolishness of the apes. Early in the Middle Ages we find this most curious of strange animals on the tavern signs. “L’Ostel des Singes,” sometimes called “The Green Monkeys,” in Senlis, France, is first mentioned in the year 1359. Our “Affenwagen” is a Swiss sign, artfully carved in wood, and dates from the Renaissance times, as does the inn “Zum Rohraff” in Strassburg, often referred to in the sermons of Geiler von Kaisersberg.