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which glares down on us from its perch above the Town Hall, in the High Street; or to a "cigar" vane (over 2ft. long and as thick as a bludgeon), large enough to give Verdant Green's famous smoke" many points, hoisted over an enterprising tobacconist's a little lower down; or to the skewered and unhappy-looking weathercock on the Parish Church; or the blackened griffin in Earl Street, all head and tail, which does duty on an old dismantled Gothic building, once called "The Brotherhood Hall" (it belonged to the fraternity of Corpus Christi, about 1422, and was suppressed in 1547), then afterwards used as a grammar school, and now—tell it not in Gath—a hop store; or, lastly, the ponderous-looking elephant, painted a sickly blue, if I remember rightly, on a great building on the banks of the Medway.
These rambling notes but touch the fringe—as it were—of a wide and ever-widening subject. A lengthy paper might be written on the different types (and some of great interest) of vanes in and around London alone; but I trust I may be allowed to express the hope that what has been said may haply enlist further interest in these silent, faithful, but somewhat neglected friends of ours, who, "courted by all the winds that hold them play," look down from their "coigne of vantage" upon the hurrying world below.