der them and all round
them there are miles and miles of superb secret passages and back
staircases, the very place for a wet afternoon. They are decorated like
second-class waiting-rooms and lead to a lot of rooms like third-class
waiting-rooms; and at every corner there is a policeman; but this only adds
to the excitement. Besides, at any moment you may blunder into some very
secret waiting-room labelled "Serjeant-at-Arms."

If you are seen by the SERJEANT-AT-ARMS you have lost the game, and if you
are seen by a Lord of the Treasury I gather from the policemen that you
would be put in the Tower. Or you may start light-heartedly from the
Refreshment Department of the House of Commons and find yourself suddenly
in the bowels of the House of Lords, probably in the very passage to the
LORD CHANCELLOR'S Secretary's Room.

Still, there is no other way for Private Secretaries to take exercise and
at the same time avoid their Members without actually leaving the building,
so risks of that sort have to be faced.

While the Private Secretary is playing hide-and-seek in the passages and
purlieus his Member waits for him in the Secretaries' Room. The
Secretaries' Room is the real seat of legislation in this country, and it
is surprising that Mr. BAGEHOT gave it no place in his account of the
Constitution. It is also surprising, in view of its importance, that it
should be such a dismal, ill-furnished and thoroughly mouldy room. It is a
rotten room. Mr. ASQUITH, when a Private Secretary, is reported to have
said of it, "In the whole course of my political career I can recall no
case of administrative myopia at all parallel to the folly or ineptitude
which has condemned the authors of legislation in His Majesty's Parliament
to discharge their functions in this grotesque travesty of a legislative
chamber, this sombre and obscure repository of mouldering archives and
forgotten records, where the constructive statesmen of to-morrow are
expected to shape their Utopias in an atmosphere of disillusion and decay,
in surroundings appointed to be the shameful sepulchre of the nostrums of
the past." If that is what Mr. ASQUITH said, I agree with him; if he didn't
say it, I wish he had.

The room is pitch-dark always, and it is full of tables and tomes. The
tables are waiting-room tables and the tomes are as Mr. ASQUITH has
described them. It is divided into two by a swing-door. One part is the
female Private Secretary part, the other is t