It is a fine and an interesting town, not wholly given up to factories and soot, and still keeping a hold upon ancient memories in the great church of St. Peter, a noble building that, about 1450, rose upon the site of Wulfrun’s church, and presents as magnificent an example of the Perpendicular style as anything to be found in the Midlands. Much might be said of St. Peter’s if this were the place for it—of its rich interior, of the curious and beautiful carved stone pulpit, and its grotesque lion, goggling with its stony eyes, erected about 1480, and of the life-sized bronze statue of Admiral Sir Richard Leveson, by Le Sœur, that supreme artist who wrought the beautiful equestrian statue of Charles I. at Charing Cross. But these pages are not for lengthy archæological disquisitions, and so St. Peter’s must needs he thus summarised, and even that fruitful source of angry discussion, the so-called “Dane’s Cross” in the churchyard, must be but mentioned. It is not a cross, but a circular pillar of red sandstone, standing twenty feet high, and covered with interlacing ornament that may be either Saxon or Norman, and is thought by some to be the memorial of a seventh century battle of Tettenhall. St. Peter’s and its surroundings form the pleasantest part of Wolverhampton, and though electric tramways and the press of commerce make the neighbourhood anything but reverend, the lawns and beautiful gardens on whose grass and variegated flowers the ancient tower looks down prove that, although the town is very earnest on the subject of getting on in the world, it does not, for all the striving, forget all those gracious things that make life better worth the living. Of old times there is little, besides the church, remaining, and the one notable thing, curiously enough, is, or was, connected with the church itself. This is the old Deanery, built in the reign of Charles II., and reminiscent of the time when the oddly conjoined Deanery of Wolverhampton and Windsor lasted, together with the collegiate establishment dissolved in 1846. The Deanery, a grand old mansion of red brick, standing in its own grounds, is now a Conservative Club. To ask a catalogue of what they make in modern manufacturing Wolverhampton would mean a lengthy and varied list; but to specialise is an easier task. Locks stand at the head of all products, with more than sixty firms—Chubb’s the most generally known—engaged in a weekly output of close upon 400,000 locks; probably as eloquent a testimonial to the world’s ingrained dishonesty as anything likely to be advanced. Thirty firms make the attendant keys. Tin-plate working and japanning come next, with cycle-manufacturing; and at the end of a long list of hardware industries, five “soot merchants.” There must be great scope for their business in this neighbourhood of the Black Country, and the only wonder is that there are not more of them. X