Grantham, it is true, has few things more interesting than its inns. This is not the confession of a _bon vivant_, suspicious though it sounds, but is just another way of stating the baldness of Grantham’s street. One of these few things is the tall steeple of the parish church, which has a fame rivalling that of some cathedrals miles away. Journeying by road or rail, that lofty spire is seen, even while Grantham itself remains undisclosed. If this were a proper place for it much might be said of the church and spire of St. Wulfran’s: how the tower rises to a height of one hundred and forty feet, and the slim crocketed spire to one hundred and forty feet more; being sixth in point of measurement among the famed spires of England. Salisbury is first, with its four hundred and four feet, followed by Norwich, three hundred and fifteen feet, Chichester, and St. Michael’s, Coventry, three hundred feet, and Louth, two hundred and ninety-two feet. But generalities must serve our turn here. If the spire is only sixth in point of measurement it is first in date, being earlier than Salisbury’s. Sir Gilbert Scott held it to be second only to Salisbury in beauty, but Scott’s reputation in matters of taste had slight foundations, and, beautiful though Grantham’s spire is, there are others excelling it. The majesty of Newark’s less lofty spire is greater than this of Grantham, and indeed it may be questioned whether a Decorated spire, comparatively so attenuated and with its purity of outline broken and worried by an endless array of crockets is really more admirable as a thing of beauty, or as a daring and successful exercise in the piling up of fretted stones in so apparently frail a fashion. [Picture: The “Wondrous Sign”] We cannot get away from the inns, and even the church is connected with them, the town being annually edified by the so-called “Drunken Sermon” preached at it in the terms of a bequest left in the form of an annual rent-charge of forty shillings on the “Angel” by one Michael Solomon. But among the popular curiosities of Grantham, few things are more notable than the unpretending inn at Castlegate known variously as the “Beehive” or the “Living Sign.” Immediately in front of the house is a small tree with a beehive fixed in its branches, and a board calling attention to the fact in the lines: “Stop, traveller, this wondrous Sign explore, And say, when thou hast viewed it o’er and o’er, ‘GRANTHAM, now two rareties are thine, A lofty Steeple and a living Sign.’” It may fairly be advanced that the suggestion to “explore” an inhabited beehive is an unfortunate choice of a word.