Loughborough, standing among ecclesiologists for bells, succeeds to Quorndon. The bell-founding firm of John Taylor & Sons, established here in 1840, is the birthplace of many of these instruments of the barbarous practice of bell-ringing that has survived into an otherwise civilised age, and here in 1881 was cast the monster bell of St. Paul’s Cathedral, “Great Paul,” whose hoarse growl—like a bell with bronchitis—is heard daily at one o’clock in the City of London. It is the largest bell in England, weighing 17-1/2 tons, and one of the most useless, being practically little else than the City man’s luncheon bell. “Great Paul,” being too big for the railway bridges, was brought to London by road. But there are other industries beside bell-founding at Loughborough. The ancient trade of bobbin-net making is still carried on, together with the hosiery and weaving and stocking-knitting that so thoroughly pervade Leicestershire and a good deal of Notts; and there are dye-works and engineering-shops too, a whole basketful of unromantic but useful and mutually dependent trades: the extensive coal-trade of the town ministering to the engineering and other power-using factories, and the big breweries subsisting upon the magnificent thirsts produced by coal-grit and the heat of furnaces. It will be guessed from the foregoing that Lovely Loughborough is not a phrase by which the place can rightly be known. Only the narrow main street, where the old “Bull’s Head” inn still exhibits a gallows sign stretching from side to side overhead, is at all removed from commonplace, and the broad market-place is lined with modern buildings in which many of the great number of Loughborough’s flashily rebuilt inns that call themselves “hotels,” and are really nothing but drinking shops, are situated. [Sidenote: _LOUGHBOROUGH_] One commonly finds that Loughborough enjoys—or perhaps that is not quite the right word; let us say endures—some of the coldest weather that the Meteorological Office reports in the winter. When a cold snap makes the whole country shiver, it will generally be found that, of all places in England, Loughborough is the coldest. But _per contra_, the townsfolk say that it is also extremely hot in summer, and the parish register records in the summer of 1808 an exceptional _heat_: “Wednesday, _July_ 13th; the heat was so intense that in consequence thereof many People died, especially they that were at work in the fields, also a great number of Horses, particularly coach-horses, drawing stage-coaches. The thermometer as high as 92.”