ound it difficult,
if not impossible. Yet I have been willing to pay up to get some real
prime Souchong, Assam, Orange Pekoe, or what not. I do not expect to get
a one and twopenny tea with a fine two and ninepenny flavour. Bather
recently I have paid 3s. 6d. a pound to get my little luxury; moreover,
I tried many and various shops, but all more or less in vain. At last,
however, I found salvation by going to a house--a retail shop
indeed--that dealt in scarcely anything else but tea. And I now get tea
full of delicious fragrance and flavour. It breathes such a splendid
aroma before it is tasted that it almost seems a sin to drink it. When,
however, I do taste a well-made cup of this infusion I am so happy and
benign that (to paraphrase some words of the late Bishop of Oxford) my
own wife might play with me.

I fear, however, I am getting rather rhapsodical on this question of
tea. There are other--what I will call specialist old-style--traders
besides those in the teetotal and unteetotal line to which I wish to
refer. But these must be reserved for another chapter.

XIV.

OLD-ESTABLISHED SHOPS.

Considering the pace at which Birmingham moved forward during the latter
half of the nineteenth century, it is not, perhaps, surprising that few
shops and houses of old date are now to be seen in the chief centre
streets of the city. A few, however, remain to remind us that Birmingham
was not built yesterday, and that it has a respectable past, and is not
a place of that mushroom growth which comes into existence in a night.

Chief among the old order of retail trading establishments still
flourishing in our midst I may particularly mention the shop of Mr.
William Pearsall, silversmith, &c. As many of my readers are aware, it
is situated in High Street, opposite the end of New Street, and is
conspicuous for its pretty--I had almost said petite--quaintness and its
genuine old-time appearance and origin. There are the small bow windows,
the little panes of glass, that are so suggestive of the architecture of
a century ago, and outside the shop everything bespeaks a past which was
not exactly of yesterday.

This great-grandfather shop, so to speak, has, indeed, been established
for more than a century, and when the present proprietor first went to
the business the trade done was chiefly in silver and silver made goods,
whereas now it is largely in electro plate, in jewellery, cutlery, &c.
The proprietor, indeed, lik