How important the spacious enclosure of the innyard was for the farmers coming to town with their loaded wagons is shown by the fact that still to-day many a hotel in Germany is simply called “Hof” (court) or “Gasthof”; as, for example: “Koelner Hof,” “Rheinischer Hof,” “Habsburger Hof,” even “Kaiserhof,” sumptuous modern structures, perhaps, which have only a narrow lighting shaft in the center of the building and nothing of the large and airy courtyards of the good old times. Many of the tavern names Shakespeare mentions in his plays we know from other sources as signs that actually decorated the streets of London. “Leopard” and “Tiger” were infrequent, but we hear of a “Leopard Tavern” in Chancery Lane, which still existed in 1665. The popular pronunciation was “lubber,” and in this form we find the beast quoted in “Henry IV” (Part II, II, i), where it is said of Falstaff: “He is indited to dinner to the Lubber’s-head in Lumbert street, to Master Smooth’s the silk-man.” Such curious distortions of strange words are nothing uncommon in popular language; we have only to remember how the old Yankee farmers used to call the panther by the gentle name “painter.” Another of Falstaff’s favorite resorts was “The Half-Moon,” likewise mentioned in “Henry IV” (Part I, II, iv), where he used to consume countless “pints of bastard” and of dark Spanish wine. “The Tiger” referred to in the “Comedy of Errors” (III, i) was, too, an actual sign of the times, as we hear of a “Golden Tiger” in Pilgrim Street, Newcastle. On the other hand, the name of the “Porcupine,” which occurs in the same play, is probably invented as a characteristic sign for a place of ill-fame. The most renowned of all the Falstaff inns is doubtless “The Garter,” his real home, so vividly described in the “Merry Wives of Windsor”: “There’s his chamber, his house, his castle, his standing-bed and truckle-bed; ’tis painted about with the story of the Prodigal, fresh and new.” These few words give us an exact picture how a sleeping-room in an inn looked in his time. The truckle-bed, it seems, was put under the standing bed and was used by the servant, if we interpret rightly the old rhyme on a “servile tutor”:-- “He lieth in the truckle-bed, While his young master lieth o’er his head.” Even the wall paintings, as Shakespeare describes them, are not invention. In the sixteenth century people loved to paint the story of the lost son on the walls of the tavern room, just as in the fifteenth century they pinned up little primitive woodcuts representing St. Christopher. Later we shall see a painter of talent like Hogarth not despise the decoration of taverns as below his genius and embellish with works of his brush the “Elephant Tavern” in Fenchurch Street, where he stayed for a time.