How came the Major by his adopted name, and was it really meant to portend anything? It was humorously said at the time that the spy had taken his pseudonym from the French form of the name of that mythical boatman of classic memory who was wont for a few halfpence to ferry the souls of the damned across the river Styx, Charon, to wit. Le Caron is, however, a common enough French name, and the Major had lived some years in France previously to migrating to the United States, in which country Thomas Beach first became Henri Le Caron. Born at Colchester, Essex, in 1841, Beach belonged to a type of family which was clearly of old-fashioned puritanical stock, and the point is important enough in view of his later claim to have acted the rôle of traitor purely on the ground of moral principle. In his autobiography he tells how from his earliest days he had been brought up to cherish the Bible and to loathe all forms and quantities of alcoholic liquor. His home life was altogether not a very bright one and dull domestic repression soon began to exert its own particular reaction on a character which was already bursting with the spirit of adventure and derring-do. He records it that the routine of his existence grew too monotonous for the larger soul within him, and how he ran away from home and a Quaker's shop at least three times before his sixteenth year, breaking his apprentice bonds and travelling far and wide, yet managing, at whatever town he made a halt, to earn what he calls a respectable living. Like most characters of his obviously crude and untutored kind, in whom the spirit of romance is a considerable, if a somewhat jumbled, equation, there was not a little of the megalomaniac in the boy, and even in those early days his soul thirsted after the big things of life. In young Beach, too, there was a bit of artistry of sorts, and just as it was a chief ambition of Spy Schulmeister to dance like a marquis of the old regime, and a foible of Spy Stieber to accumulate pectoral decorations testifying to his honour, so also the youthful Le Caron discovered a precocious passion for hymns and the music of the church organ. At Colchester he became a leading and decorous choir lad, and according to himself it was his love for psalmody rather than any regard for his puritanical parents which invariably brought about his return, prodigal-wise, to the paternal roof. One is obliged in that spirit of fairness which gives the devil all that is due to him, to insist on what are otherwise prosaic enough details, and all the more so because, to the man's admirers, his piety provides an argument for the rôle he afterwards adopted in life.