[Illustration: Sign of Fox and Hounds, Barley]
The _Adam and Eve_, another common London sign, is, we have reason to believe, frequently a repainting of the Zodiacal sign of the _Twins_, the city having according to astrologers, its ascendant in Gemini, the House of Mercury, who rules merchandise and all ingenious arts.
An odd sign to find in the heart of Essex is the _Whalebone_, and in the same county at Great Leighs, there is a _Saint Anna’s Castle_, which is supposed to stand on the site of a hermitage made sacred by the presence of some local saint.
Dean Swift was once asked by the village barber of Co. Meath, by whom he was regularly shaved, to assist him in the invention of an inscription for the sign of the _Jolly Barber_, a house which it was intended to conduct as an inn and a barber’s shop combined. Swift at once composed the following couplet, which remained under the painted sign depicting a barber with a razor in one hand and a full pot in the other, for many years:
“Rove not from pole to pole, but step in here Where nought excels the shaving but--the beer.”
_The Three Loggerheads_, generally in the form of two silly looking faces and the motto:
is an attempt to take a mean advantage of the unwary spectator. Sometimes two asses appear on the signboard with the inscription “When shall we three meet again?” and this sign is alluded to by Shakespeare in “Twelfth Night.” At Mabelthorpe is a unique sign called the _Book in Hand_. It is not so much on account of its name that it is curious, for this might have occurred to anyone, particularly in days when the ability to read was not so conspicuously common as it is to-day. But the sign itself is so odd. A rudely shaped hand and forearm sticks out straight from the brick wall and in the hand is an open book with three Latin crosses on the right page and one on the left. The origin of the sign is lost, but it seems obviously to have had at one time some ecclesiastical connection.
Many names of inns have arisen from the puns on the landlord or locality. The _Black Swan_ in Bartholomew Lane, once a resort for musical celebrities was kept by Owen Swan, parish clerk of St. Michael’s Cornhill. The _Brace_ Tavern, in Queen’s Bench Prison, was opened by two brothers of the name of Partridge. _Hat and Tun_ was the sign of a public-house in Hatton Garden, and the _Warbolt in Tun_ of the little inn at Warbleton, in Sussex. At least one _Three Pigeons_ began business with a worthy surnamed Pigeon for landlord, although this sign is usually derived from a coat of arms charged with three martlets. According to a correspondent, the _Bell Inn_ of a village not far from Oxford was formerly kept by John Good, who set up this inscription under a gigantic representation of a bell: