We may infer the great popularity of signs by the ceremonious way in which they were changed when a guild removed to other quarters. The sign was carried in solemn procession to the new inn and hung up with blasts of trumpets. The Swabian poet Mörike has tried to express the melancholy emotions of the old landlord when he sees the sign changed and finds it hard to recognize his old inn:—
“Where is the golden lamb of yore
So dear to my old guests?
I see a cock with reddish breast
Pecked it away from the door.”
An English author even tells us about the burial of a sign, which, he says, was not an unusual affair in Cumberland. We give the story in his own words: “It is a function always observed when an inn in the neighborhood of Lady Carlisle’s estate at Naworth has lost its license. The inn sign is solemnly removed, and in the dead of night is committed to the grave, in the presence of the old customers of the inn. As a rule it is ‘watered’ with tears in the shape of a bottle of whiskey, and the burial sentence runs as follows:—
“‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,
If Lady Carlisle won’t have you The Devil must.’”
But we shall not end our chapter with this story of rather doubtful taste. If we review the wealth of popular signs, which we have in no way exhausted, we may well say that everything on earth may be adopted by the people as a sign, from the cradle in which we dream our first dreams to the cross that some day will stand over our “last inn” as a pious and scholarly man has called our grave. In the beautiful churchyard that enfolds in its greenery England’s oldest existing church, St. Martin in Canterbury, we read on the tombstone of Dean Alford the simple words: “Deversorium Viatoris Hierosolymam Proficiscentis,” last inn of a pilgrim to the heavenly Jerusalem.