When I entered the Record Office yesterday the curious round room, like the smoking-room of an Atlantic liner that has taken to book-collecting, was full of students and historians poring over spidery Elizabethan script or muttering the English of Chaucer's day beneath their breath. Now and again someone with the strawberry leaf complex wanders in here, puts an old hat on the chair, and calls for documents with the air of a rather weary Malvolio. Generally speaking, the legacy and title hunters gather next door in the Legal Search Room. Here I found an assortment of women and men. Some were solicitors and barristers looking up records, some were trying to claim funds in Chancery, and others the usual fortune and title hunters. This is merely a fraction of the interest this building holds for us. It houses twenty-six miles of shelves packed with historic documents and millions of unhistoric documents. Here are the bones of English History. Come into the Museum known so well to those who have a _flair_ for the right things, the Americans. Here in two portly volumes is "Domesday Book," writ in a fair monkish hand. Shelves are stacked with letters from kings and queens, generals and admirals, cardinals and peers: humour, pathos, tragedy, passion. In one of these Wolsey, "the King's poore, hevy and wrechyd prest," asks Henry VIII to forgive him and take him back into favour. Queen Elizabeth's hand is set to a number of letters, and to her are missives from many men, including two who loved her. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, says in one: "I humbly kiss your foot," and the imprisoned Earl of Essex is represented by a brief letter written for the eyes of Gloriana alone. You can read letters which recall cannon shot on the high seas, and letters which give a vision of deep political plotting and such-like villainy. "God has given us a good day in forcing the enemy so far to leeward," wrote Sir Francis Drake aboard the "Revenge." "I hope in God the Prince of Parma and the Duke of Sedonya shall not shake handes this fewe days." Quite near you will find the last confession of Guy Fawkes. When you have enjoyed the flavour of these old days you may meet on the stairs an ordinary cat. At least so it seems. It is Felix, and he has been walking through history for centuries. It is the only cat officially on a Government staff--in spite of anything women secretaries in Whitehall may tell you! It receives a penny a day from Government funds! I believe that the terms of its appointment include a clause that it must keep itself clean, catch rats and mice, and bring up its children. If anybody killed the official cat in ancient times he had to forfeit sufficient wheat to cover the body. * * * The officer in charge of the Legal Search Room sits with the official list of lost money before him--the funds in Chancery, which, by the way, are only sufficient to make one decent full-blown millionaire--as millionaires go nowadays.