The “Pack Horse and Talbot” may now, by sheer lapse of time, be regarded as a queer sign. It is the name of what was once an inn but is now a public-house, on the Chiswick High Road, Turnham Green--a thoroughfare which is also the old coach-road to Bath. The painted sign is a pictorial allusion to the ancient wayfaring days when packmen journeyed through the country with their wares on horseback, and accompanied by a faithful dog who kept guard over his master’s goods. This type of dog--the “talbot,” the old English hound--is now extinct. Probably not one person in every thousand of those who pass the house could explain what the “Talbot” in the sign means, or would think of associating it with the dog seen in the picture. [Illustration: SIGN OF THE “BEEHIVE,” GRANTHAM.] Another London sign that tells of manners and customs long since obsolete is that of the “Running Footman,” Hay Hill, Berkeley Square, picturing a gaily uniformed man running, with a wand of office in his hand. In the middle of the eighteenth century it was as much the “correct thing” for noble families to keep a running footman to precede them on their journeys as it was for their Dalmatian dogs to trot beneath their carriages. Those “plum-pudding dogs” finally went out of fashion about half a century ago, but the running footmen became extinct half a century earlier. Extraordinary tales were told of the endurance of, and the long distances covered by, these men. Everywhere we have the “Cat and Fiddle,” a sign whose origin still troubles some people, who seek a reason for even the most unreasonable and fantastic things, and lose sight of the fact that a whimsical fancy, a kind of nursery-lore imagination, in all likelihood originated the sign, which is probably not any debased and half-forgotten allusion to “Caton le Fidèle,” the brave Governor of Calais, to “Catherine la Fidèle,” the French sobriquet for the wife of the Czar Peter, or to “Santa Catherina Fidelius,” but simply--the “Cat and Fiddle,” neither more nor less. The rest of it is all “learned” fudge, and stuff and nonsense. Serious persons will object that cats do not play the fiddle; but they do--in nursery-land, where cows have for many centuries jumped over the moon and the table utensils have eloped together, and where pigs have played whistles from quite ancient times, a little to the confusion of those who derive the “Pig and Whistle” sign from some supposed Saxon invocation to the Virgin Mary: “Pige Washail!” ’Tis a way they have in the nursery, which nobody will deny. [Illustration: SIGN OF THE “PACK HORSE AND TALBOT.” TURNHAM GREEN.] [Illustration: THE “RUNNING FOOTMAN.” HAY HILL.] [Illustration: SIGN OF THE “LION AND FIDDLE,” HILPERTON.]