Little indeed is left of the Wolverhampton of the coaching era—a fact not very greatly to be regretted, because the old town had no architectural pretensions, but a great many squalid cottages and lanes, of no real interest or antiquity. High Green was the exception. It must be borne in mind that the Wolverhampton of that time was a very small place compared with the great manufacturing town of to-day, and that the “neat market-town” of Wigstead and Rowlandson’s tour in 1797 contained only some 11,000 inhabitants. To-day it numbers 96,000, and extends along the Holyhead Road as far as Tettenhall, a distance of nearly two miles, more than a mile beyond what was, a century ago, the “small village” of Chapel Ash, a place forming now an integral part of the town. High Green was a place well named in the adjectival part of its title, for it occupied the highest part of the commanding ridge on which Wolverhampton was first built. Whatever there was of a green on its site has vanished these centuries ago, and as a market-place it has long been superseded by the great market-buildings near by, and by the Corn Exchange; both erected about 1851. Before that time it was thronged with the stalls of butchers, and with country folk come to sell their vegetables, fruit, eggs, butter, poultry, and other produce. Farmers and corn-dealers met there, in the open air, careless of the weather, as their grandfathers and remote ancestors had done before them, holding forth samples of golden grain in their great outstretched palms, and doing business with a hand-shake and a convivial glass at the “Swan,” to the great content of the pigeons that hovered numerously over this then picturesque centre of the old market-town, not yet transformed by the discovery of the mineral wealth of the district. The “Lion” was the principal inn of old Wolverhampton. It stood on the site now occupied by the Town Hall, and was originally built about 1750. Thirty coaches a day are said to have changed horses in its yard, or to have started from its doors, and under the sway of Thomas Badger, who died in 1799, and of his successor, Richard Evans, it enjoyed for a long series of years the chief posting business. The yellow-jacketed and black-hatted postboys of the “Lion” for nearly three-quarters of a century rode the pigskin, bumped and plied the whip in front of the best in Staffordshire, Shropshire, and Warwickshire.