The “Eight Bells” at Twickenham, in itself no more than a commonplace public-house, has for a sign an oddly assorted group of eight actual bells, apparently gathered at haphazard from various marine-stores, for no two are exactly of a size. Hanging as they do from a wooden bracket, projecting over the pathway, and showing prominently against the sky, they help to make the not very desirable bye-lane picturesque. It is a lane that runs down to the river, where the Twickenham eyots divide the stream in two, and has not yet been levelled to the ordinary suburban respectability of the neighbourhood. Waterside folk and other queer fish reside in, and resort to it, and on Saturday evenings the usual beery hum proceeding o’ nights from the “Eight Bells” develops into a spirituous tumult, ending at closing-time with stumbling steps and incoherent snatches of song, as the revellers, at odds with kerbstones and lamp-posts, make their devious way home. [Illustration: THE “EIGHT BELLS,” TWICKENHAM.] At Bricket Wood, Hertfordshire, a Temperance Hotel displaying the unique sign of “The Old Fox with His Teeth Drawn” may be seen. It was, until 1893, a rural inn called the “Old Fox,” but was then purchased by the Hon. A. H. Holland-Hibbert, son-in-law of Sir Wilfrid Lawson, and, like him, a total abstinence enthusiast, who made the changes noted above. At his house at Great Munden he has a collection of the signs of inns he has in the same way converted. [Illustration: SIGN OF THE “STOCKS” INN, CLAPGATE, NEAR WIMBORNE.] The “Stocks” inn, at Clapgate, near Wimborne, displays a miniature model of “stocks for three” over its porch, while the “Shears” inn at Wantage, a rustic ale-house in an obscure corner of that town, with the odd feature of a blacksmith’s forge attached, exhibits a gigantic pair of shears. [Illustration: THE “SHEARS” INN, WANTAGE.] A sign that certainly, if not in itself unusual, is nowadays in an unwonted place, is that of the old “White Bear,” a galleried coaching inn that stood in Piccadilly, on the site of the present Criterion Restaurant, until about 1860. It is a great white-painted wooden effigy that is now to be found in the garden of the little rustic inn of the same name at Fickles Hole, a quiet hamlet on the Surrey downs to the south-east of Croydon. To the stranger who first catches sight of it, this polar bear among the geraniums and the sweet-williams is sufficiently startling. [Illustration: SIGN OF THE “WHITE BEAR.” FICKLES HOLE.]