Here’s to Pands Pen Das Oci Al Hourin Ha! R: M: Les Smir Thand Funlet Fri Ends Hipre: Ign Be Ju! Stand Kin Dan Devils Peak of No! ne. The composition of this could have been no great tax on the tapster’s brain. More pleasing is the queerly spelled old notice displayed on the exterior of the “Plough” at Ford, near Stow-on-the-Wold: Ye weary travelers that pass by, With dust & scorching sunbeams dry Or be he numb’d with snow and frost With having these bleak cotswolds crost Step in and quaff my nut brown ale Bright as rubys mild and stale Twill make your laging trotters dance As nimble as the suns of france Then ye will own ye men of sense That neare was better spent six pence. The genuine old unstudied quaintness of it must, in the course of the century and a half of its existence, have sent many scorched or half-frozen travellers across Cotswold into the cosy parlour. Recently a new and ornate wing has been added to the solitary wayside house, and the poetic sign, sent up to London to be repaired, has come back, bravely gilded. Some very hard, gaunt facts are set forth on tavern signs; as on that of the “Soldier’s Fortune,” at Kidderminster, where, beneath a picture of a mutilated warrior, the passer-by may read, A soldier’s fortune, I will tell you plain, Is a wooden leg, or a golden chain. This hero, however, is fully furnished with both. When Peter Simple travelled down to Portsmouth for the first time, to join his ship, he asked the coachman which was the best inn there, and received for reply: The Blue Postesses Where the midshipmen leave their chestesses, Call for tea and toastesses, And sometimes forget to pay for their breakfastes. The “Blue Posts” inn was burned down in 1870, but many who had known it made a renewed acquaintance with the house in 1891, at the Chelsea Naval Exhibition, where a reproduction attracted much attention. There are still other “Blue Posts,” notably one in Cork Street, in the West End of London, rebuilt a few years since. The sign is the survival of a custom as old as Caxton, and probably much older, by which houses were often distinguished by their colour. Caxton, advertising his books, let it be known that if “any one, spiritual or temporal,” would purchase, he was to “come to Westmonester into the almonestrye at the Reed Pale”; and there was in the neighbouring Peter Street a “Green Pales” in the seventeenth century. The modern building of the “George and Dragon,” Great Budworth, Cheshire, has this admonitory verse over its doorway, the production of Egerton Warburton, the late squire of Arley Hall: As St. George, in armed array, Doth the Fiery Dragon slay, So may’st thou, with might no less, Slay that Dragon, Drunkenness, a moral stanza that has its fellow in a couplet carved upon an old oak beam over the door of the rebuilt “Thorn” inn at Appleton, in the same county: