now limit the trappings of woe to a more reasonable as
well as economical exhibit of tailors' and milliners' black.

~Furniture.~--Judging from some old records appertaining to the history
of a very ancient family, who, until the town swallowed it up, farmed a
considerable portion of the district known as the Lozells, or Lowcells,
as it was once called, even our well-to-do neighbours would appear to
have been rather short of what we think necessary household furniture.
As to chairs in bedrooms, there were often none; and if they had
chimnies, only movable grates, formed of a few bars resting on "dogs."
Window-curtains, drawers, carpets, and washing-stands, are not,
according to our recollection, anywhere specified; and a warming-pan
does not occur till 1604, and then was kept in the bed-room. Tongs
appear as annexations of grates, without poker or shovel; and the family
plate-chest was part of bed-room furniture. Stools were the substitutes
for chairs in the principal sitting-room, in the proportion of even
twenty of the former to two of the latter, which were evidently
intended, _par distinction_, for the husband and wife.

~Galton.~--The family name of a once well-known firm of gun, sword, and
bayonet makers, whose town-house was in Steelhouse Lane, opposite the
Upper Priory. Their works were close by in Weaman Street, but the mill
for grinding and polishing the barrels and blades was at Duddeston, near
to Duddeston Hall, the Galton's country-house. It was this firm's
manufactury that Lady Selbourne refers to in her "Diary," wherein she
states that in 1765 she went to a Quaker's "to see the making of guns."
The strange feature of members of the peace-loving Society of Friends
being concerned in the manufacture of such death-dealing implements was
so contrary to their profession, that in 1796, the Friends strongly
remonstrated with the Galtons, leading to the retirement of the senior
partner from the trade, and the expulsion of the junior from the body.
The mansion in Steelhouse Lane was afterwards converted into a
banking-house; then used for the purposes of the Polytechnic
Institution; next, after a period of dreary emptiness, fitted up as the
Children's Hospital, after the removal of which to Broad Street, the old
house has reverted to its original use, as the private abode of Dr.
Clay.

~Gambetta.~--The eminent French patriot was fined 2,000 francs for
upholding the freedom of speech and the rights of the press,