“I have passed him a couple of times. A fellow I know told me he bewitches them at the Castle of an evening with his piano. Well, he told me once that when he was working in Germany during the war, before putting a foot over the frontier he turned over what he would be, and he decided to be a farmer. Accordingly, hour after hour, he practised a farmer’s slouch. He sat down and invented his farm. Hour after hour he lived in imagination on that place, until he saw it so clearly that he could walk over every inch of it, discuss every foot of it, and he said he had only to close his eyes to see it all again--the chestnut mare with the wall eye, the duck with rheumatics. He tried to sell the place to me.” “Did you buy?” “He knew his job; but what is happening now is pathetic. These ready-made sleuths, who are the best-dressed men in Dublin, have been arriving in batches. Men with eyeglasses appear suddenly to sell bootblacking. Men in spats turn up to explain they hold an agency in condensed milk. These people fill the lounges of the best hotels, drink together, and talk confidently together.” “And,” said I, breaking in, “the barmaids ogling them explore their inmost souls, and the waiters bearing them cocktails pass on to Sinn Fein headquarters the pearls that drop from their lips.” He smiled. “Not as bad as that. I don’t suppose they give much away apart from themselves; but wherever there is a decent lounge they can be found gobbling like turkeys in a farmyard--turkeys that have not heard of a Christmas dinner. I have seen one of those peaceful commercial travellers drop an automatic pistol in the lounge of the Shelbourne Hotel, and I slunk into the lift in horror. I have seen a commercial traveller in spats leaning over a bar talking to a dimpled barmaid, while a gentleman at his elbow, in a shabby black velour hat and a dirty trench coat, took down his particulars. Even my ‘cousin,’ who has many of the best qualities of an agent, the keenness, the tirelessness, and so on, is attacked with this autumn madness, and any of these evenings if you care to hang outside his house, you will see a Government car rattle and bang up to the door, you will see half a dozen sleuths file up into his house, and presently they will come down again with him. These merry gentlemen get into the car and rattle away on some raiding expedition. And, of course, in the shadows on the other pavement, is a gentleman in a black velour hat and a dirty trench coat.” “Do you think some of them are going to be done in soon?”