The railway at last took away all the passenger traffic of the canal, and the old barge, after many years of usefulness, ceased to run. It was purchased by a man named Butterworth, who had it drawn on rollers to a position some three miles from the “cut,” and built walls against the sides, and roofed it over. [Illustration: SIGN OF THE “OLD ROCK HOUSE” INN, BARTON.] One of the finest and most artistic old signs in the country is that of the “Three Horseshoes,” a little weather-boarded ale-house at Great Mongeham, which is, in a contradictory way, quite a small village, between Sandwich and Deal. It is a rare instance of the use of wrought iron, not as the support of a sign, but as a sign itself, and is so strikingly like a number of wrought-iron signs in Nottingham Castle Museum, the work of that famous artist in iron, Huntingdon Shaw, who wrought the celebrated iron gates of Hampton Court, that it would seem to be a product of his school. The vogue of the artistic sign is returning, and a good example of modern work in iron is to be found at Great Missenden, in Buckinghamshire, where the “Red Lion” inn displays an heraldic lion in silhouette, ramping on his heraldic wreath, and clawed and whiskered in approved mediæval style. [Illustration: THE “THREE HORSESHOES,” GREAT MONGEHAM.] [Illustration: SIGN OF THE “RED LION,” GREAT MISSENDEN.] At Stourbridge, in Worcestershire, and at some other places, the sign of the “Labour in Vain” is met with, representing two busy persons in the act of trying to scrub a nigger white. The Stourbridge example shows two very serious-looking maid-servants striving to perform that impossible task, while the nigger, whose head and shoulders are seen emerging from a dolly tub, has a large, superior smile, only sufficiently to be expressed by a foot-rule. [Illustration: SIGN OF THE “LABOUR IN VAIN.”] Queer signs are often the product of ignorant alteration of old signs whose original meaning has become obscured by lapse of time. The “Mourning Bush,” for example, was a sign set up originally by a Royalist innkeeper, grieving for the death of Charles the First. A bush, or bundle of twigs, was at that time the usual sign of an ale-house, and he swathed his in black. What if he could revisit this earth after these two hundred and fifty years, and find that sign corrupted, at a little inn near Shifnal, Shropshire, into the “Maund and Bush,” the sign representing a hardy-looking laurel and a basket--“maund” being a provincialism for a wicker basket! The “Coach and Dogs” sign at Oswestry, a queer variant of the more usual “Coach and Horses” found so numerously all over the country, takes its origin from an eccentric country gentleman, one Edward Lloyd, of Llanforda, two miles from Oswestry, whose whim it was to drive to and from the town in a diminutive chaise drawn by two retrievers.