The Deluge was the mystery performed at Whitsuntide by the company of dyers in London, and from this their sign of the DOVE AND RAINBOW might have originated, unless it were adopted by them on account of the various colours of the rainbow. On the bill of John Edwards, a silk-dyer in Aldersgate Street, the Dove, with an olive branch in her mouth, is represented flying underneath the Rainbow, over a landscape, with villages, fenced fields, and a gentleman in the costume of the reign of Charles II. Besides this there are various other dyers’ bills with the sign of the DOVE AND RAINBOW, both among the Bagford and Banks Collections. A few public-houses at the present day still keep up the memory of the sign; there is one at Nottingham, and another in Leicester. “ABRAHAM OFFERING HIS SON” was the sign of a shop in Norwich in 1750. A stone bas-relief of the same subject (_Le Sacrifice d’Abraham_) is still remaining in the front of a house in the Rue des Prêtres, Lille, France. A Dutch wood-merchant, in the seventeenth century, also put up this sign, and illustrated its application by the following rhyme:-- “‘T Hout is gehakt, opdat men ’t zou branden, Daarom is dit in Abram’s Offerhande.”[375] Thus, though the wood of the sacrifice played a very insignificant part in the story, yet the simple mention of it was enough to make it a fit subject for a Dutchman’s signboard. We have a similar instance in JACOB’S WELL, which is common in London, as well as in the country. The allusion here is to the well at which Christ met the woman of Samaria, who said to him: “Art thou greater than our father Jacob, which gave us the well, and drank thereof himself, and his children, and his cattle? Jesus answered and said unto her, Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again.” (S. John iv. 12.) How cruelly these words apply to the gin-tap, at which generation after generation drink, and after which they always thirst again. Not unlikely the English use of this sign dates from the Puritan period.[376] Not always, however, had the sign any direct relation to the trade of the inmate of the house which it adorned; as, for example, MOSES AND AARON, which occurs on a trades token of Whitechapel. In allusion to this, or a similar sign, Tom Brown says, “Other amusements presented themselves as thick as hops, as Moses pictured with horns, to keep Cheapside in countenance.”[377] Even the Dutch shopkeeper, whose imagination was generally so fertile in finding a religious subject appropriate as his trade sign, was at a loss what to do with Moses; for a baker in Amsterdam, in the seventeenth century, put up the sign of Moses, with this inscription: “Moses wierd gevist in het water, Die hier waar haalt krygt vry gist, een Paaschbrood, En op Korstyd een Deuvekater.”[378]