Birmingham, says De Quincey, was, under the old dynasty of stage-coaches and post-chaises, the centre of our travelling system. He did not like Birmingham. How many they are who do not! But, look you, he gives his reasons, and acknowledges that circumstances, and not Birmingham wholly, were the cause of _his_ dislike. “Noisy, gloomy and dirty” he calls the town. “Gloomy,” because, having passed through it a hundred times, those occasions were always and invariably (less once), days and nights of rain. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred; what a monstrous proportion! And even so, the hundredth was just one fleeting glimpse of sunshine, as the Mail whirled him through; so that he—with a parting sarcasm—had not time to see whether that sunshine was, in fact, real, or whether it might not possibly be some gilt Brummagen counterfeit; “For you know,” says he, “men of Birmingham, that you _can_ counterfeit—such is your cleverness—all things in Heaven and earth, from Jove’s thunderbolts down to a tailor’s bodkin.” [Illustration: THE “HEN AND CHICKENS,” 1830.] De Quincey put up, as most travellers of his time were used to do, at the famous “Hen and Chickens”; the enormous “Hen and Chickens.” “Never did I sleep there, but I had reason to complain that the discreet hen did not gather her vagrant flock to roost at less variable hours. Till two or three, I was kept waking by those who were retiring; and about three commenced the morning functions of the porter, or of ‘boots,’ or of ‘under-boots,’ who began their rounds for collecting the several freights for the Highflyer, or the Tally-ho, or the Bang-up, to all points of the compass, and too often (as must happen in such immense establishments) blundered into my room with that appalling, ‘Now, sir, the horses are coming out.’ So that rarely, indeed, have I happened to _sleep_ in Birmingham.” The old Hen in High Street, ceased very many years ago to lay golden eggs, and her Chickens were dispersed, to be gathered under a new roof in 1798. The first notice of the original “Hen and Chickens” appeared in an advertisement of December 14th, 1741. In 1770, a certain “Widow Thomas” kept it, and in 1784 one Richard Lloyd. When he died, his widow carried on the business until the expiration of the lease in 1798. This lady, Mrs. Sarah Lloyd, was one of those enterprising and business-like women who—like Mrs. Ann Nelson and Mrs. Mountain—left so great a mark upon that age. She was not content to renew her lease of the old house, for which she had hitherto paid £100 a year rent; but, with a keen appreciation of Birmingham improvements, purchased a plot of land in the newly formed New Street, and, some time before the lease of the old house expired, began to build a much larger and imposing structure, “from the designs of James Wyatt, Esq.” It was one of the first houses in Birmingham to be built of stone, instead of brick. To this she removed in 1798, and named it “Lloyd’s Hotel and Hen and Chickens Inn.”