dow; and this was
all. There were seven other receiving houses in the town, which were
as follows: Mr. Hewitt, Hagley Row; Mr. E. Gunn, 1, Kenion Street; Mr.
W. Drury, 30, Lancaster Street; Mr. Ash, Prospect Row; Mr. White,
235, Bristol Street; Miss Davis, Sand Pits; and Mrs. Wood, 172, High
Street, Deritend. Two deliveries took place daily--one at 8 a.m., the
other at 5 p.m. The postage of a "single" letter to London then was
ninepence; but a second piece of paper, however small, even the half
of a bank note, made it a "double" letter, the postage of which was
eighteenpence.

Between Needless Alley and the house now occupied by Messrs. Reece and
Harris, as offices, were three old-fashioned and rather dingy looking
shops, of which I can tell a curious story. Rather more than twenty
years ago, the late Mr. Samuel Haines acquired the lease of these
three houses, which had a few years to run. The freehold belonged
to the Grammar School. Mr. Haines proposed to Messrs. Whateley, the
solicitors for the school, that the old lease should be cancelled;
that they should grant him a fresh one at a greatly increased rental;
and that he should pull down the old places and erect good and
substantial houses on the site. This was agreed to; but when the
details came to be settled, some dispute arose, and the negotiations
were near going off. Mr. Haines, however, one day happened to go
over the original lease--nearly a hundred years old--to see what the
covenants were, and he found that he was bound to deliver up the plot
of land in question to the school, somewhere, I think, about 1860
to 1865, "well cropped with potatoes." This discovery removed the
difficulty, the lease was granted, and the potato-garden is the site
of the fine pile known as Brunswick Buildings, upon each house of
which Mr. Haines's monogram, "S.H.," appears in an ornamental scroll.

The Town Hall had been opened three years. The Paradise Street front
was finished, and the two sides were complete for about three-fourths
of their length; but that portion where the double rows of columns
stand, and the pediment fronting Ratcliff Place, had not been built.
The whole of that end was then red brick. Prom the corner of Edmund
Street a row of beggarly houses, standing on a bank some eight feet
above the level of the road, reached to within a few yards of the hall
itself, the space between them and the hall being enclosed by a high
wall. On the other side, the houses in Pa