ding. A few have even been taverns since
first built; others have served many other uses. A well-preserved old
house, built in 1690 in Sudbury, Massachusetts, was originally known as
the Red Horse Tavern, but has acquired greater fame as the Wayside Inn
of Longfellow's Tales. Its tap-room with raftered ceiling and cage-like
bar with swinging gate is a picturesque room, and is one of the few old
tap-rooms left unaltered in New England.

Every inn had a name, usually painted on its swinging sign-board, with
some significant emblem. These names were simply repetitions of old
English tavern-signs until Revolutionary days, when patriotic landlords
eagerly invented and adopted names significant of the new nation. The
scarlet coat of King George became the blue and buff of George
Washington; and the eagle of the United States took the place of the
British lion.

The sign-board was an interesting survival of feudal times, and with its
old-time carved and forged companions, such as vanes and weathercocks,
doorknockers and figureheads, formed a picturesque element of decoration
and symbolism. Many chapters might be written on historic,
commemorative, emblematic, heraldic, biblical, humorous, or significant
signs, nearly all of which have vanished from public gaze, as has
disappeared also the general incapacity to read, which made pictorial
devices a necessity. Gilders, painter-stainers, smiths, and joiners all
helped to make the tavern-sign a thing of varied workmanship if not of
art. It is said that Philadelphia excelled in the quantity and quality
of her sign-boards. With fair roads for colonial days, the best and
amplest system of transportation, and the splendid Conestoga wagons,
great inns multiplied throughout Pennsylvania. In Baltimore both taverns
and signs were many and varied, from the Three Loggerheads to the Indian
Queen with its "two hundred guest-rooms with a bell in every room," and
the Fountain Inn built around a shady court, with galleries on every
story, like the Tabard Inn at Southwark.

The swinging sign-board of John Nash's Tavern at Amherst, Massachusetts,
is here reproduced from the _History of Amherst_. It is a good type of
the ordinary sign-board which was found hanging in front of every tavern
a century ago.

In Virginia and the Carolinas taverns were not so plentiful nor so
necessary; for a traveller might ride from Maryland to Georgia, and be
sure of a welcome at every private house on the way. Som