e nothing to say, be mute as a dumb man. He has not finished
his investigations and has a morbid caution about making any
suggestion based on incomplete data." A day or two afterward I was
in the Public Record Office in Fetter Lane, the roomy fire-proof
structure which holds the archives of England. You sit in the Search
Room, a most interesting place. Rolls and dusty tomes lie heaped about
you, the attendants go back and forth with long strips of parchment
knotted together by thongs, hanging down to the floor before and
behind, written-over by the fingers of scribes in the mediaeval days
and sometimes in the Dark Ages. The past becomes very real to you as
you scan Domes Day Book which once was constantly under the eye of
William the Conqueror, or the documents of kings who reigned before
the Plantagenets. As I sat busy with some original letters of Henry
Vane, written by him when a boy in Germany in the heart of the Thirty
Years' War, a vigorous brown-haired man came up to me with a pleasant
smile and introduced himself as Samuel Rawson Gardiner. Dr. Garnett
had told him about me and about my especial quest, and with rare
kindness, he offered to give me hints. It was for me a fortunate
encounter, for no other man knew, as Gardiner did, the ground I
desired to cover. He put into my hands old books, unprinted diaries,
scraps of paper inscribed by great figures in historic moments, the
solid sources, and also the waifs and strays from which proper history
must be built up. He would look in upon me time after time in the
Search Room; in the Reading Room of the British Museum we sat side by
side under the great dome. We were working in the same field and the
experienced master passed over to the neophyte the yellow papers and
mildewed volumes in, which he was digging, with suggestions as to how
I might get out of the chaff the wheat that I wanted. He invited me to
his home at Bromley in Kent, where he allowed me to read the proofs
of the volume in his own great series which was just then in press.
It related to matters that were vital to my purpose and I had the rare
pleasure of reading a masterly work and seeing how the workman
built, inserting into his draft countless marginal emendations, the
application of sober second thought to the original conception.
I spent the best part of the night in review and it was for me a
training well worth the sacrifice of sleep. In the pleasant July
afternoon we sat down to tea in the lit