h Treasurer, Surveyor, Analyst, Chief Constable,
and every other department of Corporation work. The furnishing of the
Council Chamber and the other parts of the Municipal Buildings amounted
to L15,603, the laying in of the gas and water services being L2,418
additional.

_Odd-Fellows' Hall_.--Before the New Street Railway Station was erected
there was an Odd-Fellows' Hall in King Street. The first stone of the
present building in Upper Temple Street was laid early in 1849, the
opening ceremony taking place Dec. 3 same year. The principal room or
"hall" will accommodate about 1,000 persons, the remaining portion of
the premises being let off in offices.

_Parish Offices_.--The meeting-place of the Board of Guardians and their
necessary staff of officers has from the earliest days of Poor Law
government been the most frequented of any of our public buildings.
Formerly the headquarters were at the Workhouse in Lichfield Street, but
when that institution was removed to Birmingham Heath, the large
building at the corner of Suffolk Street and Paradise Street was built
for the use of the parish officers, possession being taken thereof Feb.
26, 1853. Thirty years seems but a short period for the occupation of
such a pile of offices, but as it has been necessary several times to
enlarge the Workhouse, as well as to collect very much larger sums from
the ratepayers, it is but in the natural order of things that the
Overseers, Guardians, and all others connected with them should be
allowed more elbow-room. A parish palace, almost rivalling our Municipal
Buildings in magnificence of ornate architecture, has therefore been
erected at the junction of Edmund Street and Newhall Street, where poor
unfortunate people going to the Workhouse, and whose ultimate
destination will possibly be a pauper's grave, may have the
gratification of beholding beautiful groups of statuary sculpture,
Corinthian columns of polished granite, pilasters of marble, gilded
capitals, panelled ceilings, coloured architraves, ornamental cornices,
encaustic tiles, and all the other pretty things appertaining to a
building designed in a "severe form of the style of the French
Renaissance," as an architectural paper critic calls it. Ratepayers will
also have pleasure in taking their money to and delivering it over in
"one of the most convenient suites of poor-law offices in the kingdom,"
possibly deriving a little satisfaction from the fact that their
descendants