A sign that costs one hundred and fifty to two hundred dollars would be, even in our days of high-paid labor, a thing worth looking at. In the times of the Renaissance it certainly was a work of excellent craftsmanship, sculptured in wood and richly gilded. On an extensive tour through England which brought us to the charming western fishing-village of Clovelly, with its “New Inn” and the more romantic “Red Lion” down by the little harbor, and to Chester, in the north, founded by the Romans, we were disappointed to find so few old signs of artistic value. We found very few carved in wood like “The Blue Boar” in Lincoln or “The Swan” in Wells, from whose windows the beautiful western façade of the cathedral, unusually rich in sculptures, is seen through the green veil of huge old trees. This swan sign shows certain characteristics of the period of the First Empire, and surely does not date back beyond 1800. Also the famous “Four Swans” in the little town of Waltham Cross, north of London, perhaps the only existing example of an old English custom to construct the sign like a triumphant arch across the street, are not so old as the tavern, which a bold inscription dates in the year 1260. How could a sign delicately carved in wood resist the inclemency of the weather, when the stone sculptures of the cathedrals,--as in Exeter, for instance, or in Salisbury,--although leaning against the protecting walls of these gigantic structures, suffered so much? To please the lovers of antiquity some owners of old houses put the most arbitrary dates of their foundation on the neatly-painted fronts. In the street in Chester that leads down to “The Bear and Billet,” one of England’s oldest frame houses, we saw the date 1006 painted on a façade, evidently built in Renaissance times. Other burghers and house-owners who have more respect for exact historic truth, see, of course, in such misleading inscriptions an unfair competition. [Illustration: THE·SWAN·IN·WELLS·] [Illustration: Ye Olde Four Swans·in Waltham Cross·England·1260·] Signs wrought in iron seem to have been rare in England, the art of forging being less developed there than in the south of Germany. Curiously enough the South-Kensington Museum in London, an enormous storehouse of old works of arts and crafts, contains not a single English sign, but a very beautifully forged iron sign from Germany, dated 1635,--a baker’s sign, as the great crown and the heraldic lions reveal to us. A friendly assistant at the Museum showed us another German sign dating from the end of the seventeenth century, charmingly carved and gilded, representing the workshop of a shoemaker. These two were the only signs that the Museum possessed.