The people who used to live in the fourteen quaint little brick almshouses have been transferred to a building in the country, and the London County Council has bought this property for their museum from the Ironmongers’ Company, from whose seventeenth-century “Master,” Sir Robert Geffrye, it takes its name. It is a fascinating place; like a rather badly arranged old curiosity shop. There are old staircases--one from Boswell’s house in Queen Street is the most beautiful--and lovely panelled rooms and all sorts of things that demonstrate how beautiful interior decoration was before the age of machine-made furniture. There is a charming room from New Court, Lincoln’s Inn, and many other interesting exhibits including a beautiful lacquered Chinese palanquin, but what I liked best were the fragile, unbelievable wood carvings of Grinling Gibbons. If there were nothing else to see in the Geffrye Museum, it would be worth while to go to look at what a master hand can do with a block of wood. Evelyn thought Grinling Gibbons “the greatest master both of invention and rarenesse of work that the world ever had in any age.” I had cherished the mistaken belief that Gibbons was an Englishman for so long that it was with regret I found that this great artist was born in Rotterdam and only came to England in 1667 when he was twenty-four years old. It is many long years since I was first shown some of Grinling Gibbons’ marvellous work--so many that only the effect it had on me remains, while the date and place have gone from me. I never willingly miss seeing what his hand has carved, and if any reader of these pages is in the habit of coming to London often and making friends on each trip with another of the men of genius who have given the city its proud record, I can tell them where they may study the wizardlike work of this master craftsman and great artist. The most magnificent piece of work he carved is in the choir of St. Paul’s, but there are long festoons of flowers in St. Mary Abchurch, in Abchurch Yard, off Abchurch Lane, a turning out of Cannon Street. In old St. Mary Abchurch you will also find a wonderful painted dome by Sir James Thornhill, Hogarth’s father-in-law, whose house in Dean Street, Soho, has only lately been pulled down. St. James’s, Piccadilly, that suave building that breathes mid-Victorian portliness, broadcloth and self-satisfaction, has a lovely marble font carved by Grinling Gibbons, but the cover was stolen. Later research has destroyed the widely-spread belief that Grinling Gibbons carved the pedestal for King Charles I.’s statue in Trafalgar Square, but over the mantelpiece in the vestry of St. Dunstan’s-in-the-East, between Great Tower Street and Lower Thames Street, you will find another carving.