During many months of acute national emergency, while the war was settling into its groove, there was no more zealous, no more persevering, and no more ineffectual subject of the King than the Self-Appointed Spy-Catcher. You never know what ferocity means until you have been approached by a titled lady who has persuaded herself that she is on the track of a German spy. We Britons are given to boasting of our grit in adversity and of our inability to realize when we are beaten. In no class of the community were these national traits more conspicuous in the early days of the war than in the ranks of the amateur spy-catching fraternity and sisterhood--for the amateur spy-catcher never caught a spy. Only after months of disappointment and failure did these self-appointed protectors of their country begin to abandon a task which they had taken up with enthusiastic fervour, and which they had prosecuted with unfaltering resolution. Although it was at the hands of the despised professional that enemy agents were again and again brought to face the firing party in the Tower ditch, the amateurs entertained, and perhaps still entertain, a profound contempt for the official method. One fair member of the body, indeed, so far forgot herself as to write in a fit of exasperation to say that we must--the whole boiling of us--be in league with the enemy, and that we ought to be "intered." They were in their element when, after the fall of Maubeuge, it transpired that the Germans had gun-platforms in certain factories situated within range of the forts, that they had established ready prepared for action should they be required. Anybody with an asphalt lawn-tennis court then became suspect. A very bad case was reported from the Chilterns, just the very sort of locality where Boches contemplating invasion of the United Kingdom would naturally propose to set up guns of big calibre. A building with a concrete base--many buildings do have concrete bases nowadays--near Hampstead was the cause of much excitement. When the unemotional official, sent to view the place, suggested that the extremely solid structure overhead would be rather in the way supposing that one proposed to emplace a gun, or guns, on the concrete base, it was urged that there was a flat roof and that ordnance mounted on it would dominate the metropolis. There was a flat roof all right, but it turned out to be of glass.