~Moseley Hall.~--Hutton relates that on July 21, 1786, one Henshaw
Grevis came before him in the court of Requests, as a poor debtor, who,
thirty years before, he had seen "completely mounted and dressed in
green velvet, with a hunter's cap and girdle, at the head of the pack."
This poor fellow was the last member of a family who had held the
Moseley Hall estate from the time of the Conquest. In the riots of 1791
the Hall was burnt down, being rebuilt ten years after.

~Mothering Sunday~, or Mid-Lent Sunday, has its peculiarities according
to districts. In Birmingham the good people who like to keep up old
customs sit down to veal and custard. At Draycot-le-Moors they eat pies
made of figs. The practice of visiting the parents' home on this day was
one of those old-time customs so popular in the days of our grandfathers
and great-grandfathers (but which, with many others have fallen into
disuse), and this is supposed to have given rise to the "Mothering
Sunday" name. Prior to the Reformation, the Catholics kept the day as a
holy day, in honour of the Mother of Jesus, it being a Protestant
invention to turn the fast-day into one of feasting.

~Mount Misery.~--At the close of the great war, which culminated at
Waterloo, it was long before the blessings of peace brought comfort to
the homes of the poor. The first effects of the sheathing of the sword
was a collapse in prices of all kinds, and a general stagnation of
trade, of which Birmingham, made prosperous through the demand for its
guns, &c., felt the full force. Bad trade was followed by bad harvests,
and the commercial history of the next dozen years is but one huge
chronicle of disaster, shops and mills closing fast, and poverty
following faster. How to employ the hundreds of able-bodied men
dependent on the rates was a continual puzzle to the Overseers, until