What we know for a certainty is that the spy's father was a kind of unattached or nonconforming Lutheran minister at Neu-Freistett in 1760, and that Karl Schulmeister was born here on 5th August 1770, when Napoleon was about one year old. The meagre accounts which remain extant give us the picture of a village boy of respectable position whose character bore a striking resemblance to that which Robert Clive earned among the townspeople of Market Drayton in his early years. Schulmeister, at the age of twelve, was the acknowledged leader of the local band of youthful marauders and scapegraces—hooligans we would call them in these days. At the age of seventeen he had already become known as one of the most accomplished smugglers on the Franco-German frontier, a business, it is noteworthy, in which he engaged, either personally or by proxy, to the closing years of his life. At the age of twenty-two he married an Alsatian maid called Unger, and established himself in two distinct trades which his considerable smuggling operations were likely to render lucrative at the time. In after years, however, when he had become the lord of a château and large pleasance, and preferred to be known as Monsieur de Meinau, the spy was prone to overlook the fact that he had at one time kept a provision shop and an ironmongery at Neu-Freistett. Smuggling he was always willing to admit, and for the reason that in Revolutionary times, when life was accounted cheap, it required much courage and resource, he said, to become a successful smuggler. Undoubtedly the experience he acquired in this dangerous trade had called for many of the mental qualities which were to serve him so well in his after-career.