“Who taught that heaven-directed spire to rise? 
  ‘The Man of Ross,’ each lisping babe replies.”

John Kyrle, who died Nov. 11, 1724, though not a native, resided at Ross nearly the whole of his long and loyal life of close on 90 years, and Pope, who often visited the neighbourhood, there became acquainted with him and his good works, and embalmed his memory in undying verse as an example to future generations.  A more benevolent lover of his fellowman than Kyrle cannot be named, and a society for cultivating purity of taste, and a delight in aiding the well-being of others, is rightly called after him.  The Birmingham Kyrle Society was established in 1880, and frequent paragraphs in the local papers tell us of their doings, at one time cheering the inmates of the institutions where the sick and unfortunate lie, with music and song, and at another distributing books, pictures, and flowers, where they are prized by those who are too poor to purchase.  The officers of the society will be pleased to hear from donors, as let contributions of flowers or pictures be ever so many, the recipients are far more numerous.  Mr. Walliker, our philanthropic postmaster, is one of the vice-presidents, and the arrangements of the parcel post are peculiarly suited for forwarding parcels.

Lady Well.—­There is mention in a document dated 1347 of a “dwelling in Egebaston Strete leading towards God well feld,” and there can be no doubt that this was an allusion to the Lady Well, or the well dedicated to the blessed Virgin, close to the old house that for centuries sheltered the priests that served St. Martin’s, and which afterwards was called the Parsonage or Rectory.  The well spring was most abundant, and was never known to fail.  The stream from it helped to supply the moat round the Parsonage, and there, joined by the waters from the higher grounds in the neighbourhood of Holloway Head, and from the hill above the Pinfold, it passed at the back of Edgbaston Street, by the way of Smithfield passage and Dean Street (formerly the course of a brook) to the Manor House moat.  The Ladywell Baths were historically famous and, as stated by Hutton, were the finest in the kingdom.  The Holy Well of the blessed Virgin still exists, though covered over and its waters allowed to flow into the sewers instead of the Baths, and any visitor desirous of testing the water once hallowed for its purity must take his course down the mean alley known as Ladywell Walk, at the bend in which he will find a dirty passage leading to a rusty iron pump, “presented by Sir E.S.  Gooch, Bart., to the inhabitants of Birmingham,” as commemorated by an inscription on the dirty stone which covers the spring and its well.  God’s Well field is covered with workshops, stables, dirty backyards and grimy-looking houses, and the Baths are a timber-yard.