The bibliography connected with the business of espionage is not, as may be supposed, a very extensive one. Great spies have all written their memoirs, but in no case can these works be regarded as trustworthy records of the actual parts played by their writers in important historic events or episodes, and it is always necessary to go to independent chroniclers in order to arrive at the truth. As regards themselves, they are peculiarly fortunate in that highly placed patrons and collaborators have rarely, if ever, condescended to criticise or question their claims or statements, the result being that their most preposterous pretensions find acceptance at face value. It is well, too, that not one of them, as far as the writer has discovered, evinces anything like literary tact in his attempts to conceal the essentially underhand nature of his professional art. Your Schulmeisters and Stiebers, on the bare evidence of their own life stories, disclose their real motives and characters so clearly and intimately as to leave us with the impression that it is only very poor judges of human nature who can fail to categorise them accurately. Our own study of the master spy has left us unimpressed regarding the qualities of either head or heart which are called for in the business of espionage, and whatever courage may appear to attach to the characters of men like Schulmeister, Stieber and even André, we remain convinced that there was in none of them anything like nobility of purpose and that a very cheap material ambition underlay all their respective rôles, dramatic though those rôles may have been. The characters of the two spies of the War of Independence seem to us to have been lamentably lacking in that fine spirituality which one looks for in men who are willing to die for any strong faith that is in them; the American appears to have been an idealist of a type which is not easily differentiable from the oriental fanatic who is said to possess no very settled convictions about his cause; while the Englishman's motives were based purely upon rapid self-advancement. As to Le Caron, we admit having approached his case with every predisposition to admire him, only to find our earlier illusions entirely shattered after a careful study of his reminiscences; and the printed word must be allowed to go a long way towards self-revelation. As for Schulmeister, he threw his lot in with the side which paid him the highest price, and patriotism or nobility of sentiment in no way coloured his otherwise important abilities and services, while Stieber—the odious Stieber was at once a cringing self-seeker, a bragging bully and, shorn of his protections, an obvious and elemental coward. MacParlan was a detective pure and simple, and to him there attaches no stigma of having taken an oath to serve a cause which secretly he meant to betray. Of all the rôles enacted by the various exponents of espionage