10 being a favorite one—when interest was demanded or mortgages were forfeited. They were not by any means the only Italians who publicly courted the queen _Regina Pecunia_; the ancient name in England for a banker, which was _Lombard_, and the street in London called Lombard Street, preserving the memory of the Milanese and others out of Lombardy who took up their first residence there before the year 1274, and were great moneychangers and usurers. The stupendous fortunes of the Chigi, who gave Pope Alexander VII. to the church and are now Roman princes, and before them of the Medici family, which became royal, were amassed chiefly in the banking business; but it is a popular error that the well-known sign of the pawnbrokers’ three gilt balls is derived from the armorial bearings of the latter, which their agents in England and other countries placed over the doors of their loan-shops. The arms of the Medici were _or_, six torteaux _gules_ except the one in chief, which was _azure_ charged with three fleurs-de-lis _or_. Whether these roundlets had any allusion, as has been suggested, to doctors’ pills and the professional origin whence the family name is supposed to be derived, we cannot determine; but the gold pieces called bezants because coined at Constantinople—Byzantium—and so common at an early period in Italy that the saying _Aver buoni Bisanzi_ was a proverbial expression of one who had plenty of money, seem to have been early the distinguishing sign of money-lenders and changers, and are the true origin of the pawnbrokers’ balls.