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 little shaded garden where I met the son and daughter of my host and also Mrs. Gardiner, an accomplished writer and his associate in his labours.  The interval between tea and dinner we filled up with a long walk over the fields of Kent during which appeared the social side of the man.  He told me with modesty that he was descended from Cromwell through Ireton, and the vigour of his stride, with which I found it sometimes hard to keep up, made it plain that he was of stalwart stock and might have marched with the Ironsides.  A day or two later he bade me good-bye; he and his wife departing for the continent for a long bicycle tour.  The indefatigable scholar was no less capable in the fields and on the high road than in alcoves and the Search Room.