kitchen, and tools for the whole system of carpentry.

The places where our athletic ancestors performed these curious
productions of art, were in the shops fronting the street: some small
remains of this very ancient custom are yet visible, chiefly in Digbeth,
where about a dozen shops still exhibit the original music of anvil
and hammer.

As there is the highest probability that Birmingham produced her
manufactures long before the landing of Caesar, it would give pleasure
to the curious enquirer, could he be informed of her size in those very
early ages; but this information is for ever hid from the historian, and
the reader. Perhaps there never was a period in which she saw a decline,
but that her progress has been certain, though slow, during the long
space of two or three thousand years before Charles the Second.

The very roads that proceed from Birmingham, are also additional
indications of her great antiquity and commercial influence.

Where any of these roads lead up an eminence, they were worn by the long
practice of ages into deep holloways, some of them twelve or fourteen
yards below the surface of the banks, with which they were once even,
and so narrow as to admit only one passenger.

Though modern industry, assisted by various turnpike acts, has widened
the upper part and filled up the lower, yet they were all visible in the
days of our fathers, and are traceable even in ours. Some of these, no
doubt, were formed by the spade, to soften the fatigue of climbing the
hill, but many were owing to the pure efforts of time, the horse, and
the showers. As inland trade was small, prior to the fifteenth century,