Shiffnal is a little place, changed less in the course of three hundred years than any along this road. Three centuries ago, when it was called “Idsall” quite as often as by its other name, all the town, with the exception of the church, was brand new, and its site with it; for the fire that in 1591 had levelled it with the ground led to the new township being erected a hundred yards or so to the east of the old one. [Illustration: SHIFFNAL.] No fires, however destructive, warned our Elizabethan forbears that timber was a dangerous material to build with, and Shiffnal arose, one mass of timbered houses, and by a happy chance they most of them remain to this day; so that, whether one comes into the town by road, or is swept swiftly over it by train on the Great Western Railway that looks down from a lofty embankment upon the queer old Market-place, the effect is charming indeed. But, lest this magpie architecture should, or ever could, look monotonous, there have been introduced, from time to time, buildings in other styles and materials. Down the street, and seen, in fact, before one arrives at the Market-place itself, is, for example, the “Jerningham Arms,” stucco-fronted and thrusting forth the elaborate quarterings of the Jerninghams, Lords Stafford, and lords of the manor, ensigned with the Bloody Hand of Ulster, which leads the ignorant to suppose that Allsopp’s ales are obtainable within. The “Jerningham Arms” was a coaching inn, and the “Star” (prominent in the illustration, with a skylight on its roof) another, and a handsomer. Behind the fine old red-brick front of that house, and through the archway, the stable yard runs down; the beam over the arch rich in the badges of old fire insurance offices, and above them the sculptured armorial shield of some forgotten county family.