Of course the great civic event of the year is the well-known and oft-described procession and the banquet given on the 9th November by the new lord mayor, chosen on Michaelmas Day, and the sheriffs to the members of the Cabinet and other distinguished guests. No women are permitted to be present and to hear the important political speeches often made at these dinners, but there are other times when their presence is tolerated. I have seen the big wooden figures of Gog and Magog in the gallery of the great hall look down on a recruiting meeting early in the war--on the gathering of one of those organisations that now and then are the temporary guests of the City Corporation, and on the ceremony of presenting the Freedom of the City to an overseas Prime Minister. The hall is open to the public at the usual hours, 10-5.30, so go in and nod to Gog and Magog and look at the fifteenth century two-light window in the south-west corner--the only old one in the hall. Coming out of the Guildhall on the left is the passage leading to the Museum and the Library. The latter is a fascinating place, with less red tape about consulting the books than in any other place of the size in London. You simply write your name and the book you want on a slip of paper, and the affair is done. If you seek information on a certain point, and do not know where to find it, the courteous director and his no less willing staff take the greatest trouble to help. I went there lately on such a quest, and book after book was produced for me by three assistants till the director in charge, who had evidently been doing some private research on my behalf, appeared triumphantly with the volume that gave the solution to my problem. It is a long, pleasant room, as indeed all book-lined rooms must be, with seven book-lined bays on either side. The collection contains about 200,000 volumes, besides many manuscripts. If you are a Shakespearean enthusiast you will find there among its rare treasures, the first, second and fourth folios of Shakespeare’s plays and a document bearing Shakespeare’s signature. Naturally the library rather specialises on books about London, and the museum in the basement beneath (entered from Basinghall Street) is nearly filled with London relics--Roman antiquities, mediæval shop-signs, some of the lovely Jacobean jewellery found in Wood Street, the rest of which is in Lancaster House, instruments of torture from Newgate, and many other things that tell of the City life in mediæval days. Round about and within a few minutes’ walk of the Guildhall cluster the halls of the City Companies. The most important in the order of precedence are the Mercers, Grocers, Drapers, Fishmongers, Goldsmiths, Skinners, Merchant Taylors, Haberdashers, Salters, Ironmongers, Vintners and Clothworkers. Their halls are not supposed to be open to the general public, but it is possible to see most of them on application.