of the spoils before they were secured, when I learned that the sum at first offered had been 10,000 marks but it had then recently been increased to 25,000. Some compensation remains to me in being able to look back at this attention on the part of the Hun as a compliment of some value to my personal activities.

In the spring of 1916, during our military operations in Belgium, a deep and crafty Alsatian of violent disposition, and of German descent, was captured by our Tommies, and to save his own skin admitted he had been employed in the German Foreign Secret Service since the outbreak of war. Much valuable information was thus obtained; by way of test evidence he stated that inter alia he had been ordered to endeavour to hold my trail (I was known to him) during my Baltic wanderings in the late autumn of 1914; and that although he had persisted in various disguises he had been led a terrible dance and had been compelled to abandon the task as hopeless. I was able to corroborate this.

Anyone who has lived a strenuous life of many ups and downs must at times have rubbed shoulders with celebrities. In later years these personal reminiscences invariably provide reflections of more than passing interest.

The author has, from his teens upwards, been swayed with an insatiable lust for travelling in foreign lands. During these peregrinations his experiences have been somewhat unique, his adventures many. An instinctive inquisitiveness has more than once caused his arrest for trespassing in private places of national importance; whilst cosmopolitan habits, imbibed from bohemian associations, may have tended to mould a character adapted for the special work now under consideration.

Owing to a fortunate, or unfortunate, lapse of good manners he was on one occasion—a good many years ago—given ample opportunity to survey at close quarters the Kaiser, his Empress the Kaiserin, little Willie, and the then entire German royal family, from the confines of a guard-room in the grounds of their Imperial Schloss at Potsdam.

The same year Lord Roberts, with General Wood of the U.S.A. Army, personally escorted him round the most interesting sights of Dresden. The very next day he was arrested in Bohemia for want of a passport.

In 1895 he accompanied Dr. Leyds, then head of the South African Secret Service, when he was on his way to Berlin to interview the Kaiser on a mission of most serious menace to Great Britain on behalf of his master Oom Paul Kruger; although the author was unaware at the time of the importance of that mission. Cecil Rhodes he knew as a visitor to his father's house. Dr. Jamieson he has sported with; Dr. Fridjof Nansen is no stranger to him; whilst he crossed the North Sea when the submarine season was in full swing with Ronald Amundsen, that most interesting discoverer of the South Pole. He was within a stone's-throw of Dr. Sun Yat Sen, in the province of Kiang So, when the northern Chinese Army of Yuan Shi Kai surrounded and so nearly captured him during the rebellion of 1918, on the eve of his escape to Japan. Under the Great Wall of China on the southern limits of the Gobi desert he was within an ace of being captured by the notorious renegade "White Wolf"; whilst part of the band of another equally celebrated bandit, Raisuli, gave him cold shudders down the spine in 1896, despite the scorching heats of the Sahara. He has been an unwilling listener to treason from the lips of one or other of the much-wanted Hardyal or Gardit Singh, who, on the western foothills of the Rocky Mountains prophesied that Germany would declare war in the autumn of 1914; whilst in direct contrast to these unenviable experiences he has been the recipient of hospitality and of sport as the guest of Royalty; although the enforced formalities attendant upon such experiences tend to destroy the charm which may be believed to surround the honour.

Variety has been provided by being brought in contact with Nihilists in Russia and Siberia; with anarchists in France and Spain; as a trembling defendant in a stump-head court-martial by backwoodsmen in Western America, where justice is administered with lightning-like rapidity, and fatal mistakes often result through misidentification, as was so nearly the case in his own particularly uncomfortable experience as the unlucky chief actor in a "hold up" on the trail in British Columbia; and more than once he has been lost in the untrodden wilds of vast forests. But these experiences of the ups and downs of life pale and sink into insignificance when compared with the vortex of the rapid, rushing, kaleidoscopic changes, the hair-breadth escapes, the blood-curdling thrills, the risks, the dangers and excitements, which at times are part and parcel of the life of a Secret Service agent.

Secret Service, Intelligence, Reconnaissance, Investigation Strategical or Military Agent—use any name you will—the work of each merely resolves itself for the time being into "the antennæ, or the senses of fighting units"; the seeing, the hearing, the smelling, or the touching of a fleet or an army; of what is before, behind, surrounding, or in its midst. Without its aid few battles could be won and no ultimate victory anticipated.

Military and naval officers endowed with sufficient intelligence, brains, and philological ability are, as a rule, very keen to devote some part of their career to foreign Secret Service. It is believed, with some certitude, to be the surest step to early promotion; to pave the way to future advancement. Amongst those who have risen from such a foundation and who have proved their worth to the British Empire may be mentioned the late Lord Kitchener, who in Egypt, under various disguises, penetrated far into the interior. Colonel Burnaby, Lord Roberts, Sir Richard Burton and hundreds of other distinguished and prominent men may be included in the category; whilst Lt.-General Sir R. Baden-Powell eulogises this branch of the service in a book entitled "My Adventures as a Spy." He writes: "It is an undisputable fact that our Secret Service has at all times been recruited from men of unblemished personal honour who would not descend to any act which in their view was tainted with meanness."

No sane, thinking man would condemn Secret Service agents as following a dishonourable calling. If it were so, then it would be equally—if not more—dishonourable to employ, to guide, and to direct them. Yet all commanders of all nations employ them and have done so from time immemorial; and if any nation failed to do so it might as well—as Lord Wolseley said—"sheath its sword for ever."

To quote a few well-known names at random, Catinat investigated in the disguise of a coalheaver; Montlue as a cook; Ashby visited the Federal line in the American Civil War as a horse-doctor; whilst General Nathaniel Lyon visited the Confederate camp at St. Louis in disguise before he attacked and captured it. In 1821, George III. granted a pension to the mother of Major André, who, whilst acting as aide-de-camp to General Clinton, was condemned as an English Secret Service agent; he further gave a baronetcy to his brother; whilst the remains of the hero were exhumed, brought from America to England, and buried in Westminster Abbey.

The Japanese, one of the proudest nations in the world, whose code of honour is stricter even than our own, accord the highest honours to military or naval intelligence officers, whose bravery and understanding they fully recognise; although they never fail to shoot one whenever and wherever he may be caught acting against them.

It is sometimes puzzling to understand what is the real motive which prompts our military and naval officers to seek so persistently to become enrolled in the Secret Service Department. Is it solely the desire to