To add to the complexities of André's particular case, no one seems to be very certain where he passed the early years of his education, though it seems correct that the best part of his academic training was obtained in that always very cosmopolitan University of Geneva. We are assured that there he mastered several European tongues, that he became an adept in the social arts and possessed an acquaintance with the best classical literatures. It is only, however, in 1769, the year of his father's death, that we really begin to locate him, and then we find him living at Clapton, where his father, a merchant, resided in the local manor-house. At the time of this gentleman's death, André was eighteen years of age and his precociousness seems to be established by the fact that in those days he was paying his addresses to the daughter of a clergyman named Seward, the lady being several years older than himself. Not only that, but Anna Seward was, it appears, a poet and the leader of a _salon_ of sorts at Lichfield, where many well-known literary lights of the day were wont to assemble and discuss the trends of literary and artistic thought and action. Evidently Miss Seward did not take her gallant too seriously, for we hear of him shortly afterwards as a worshipper at the shrine of Honoria Sneyd, who was afterwards to become the mother of Maria Edgeworth. Romance, it is certain, entered generously into the youth of André. It is clear also that the counting-house of a London merchant's establishment was not at all to the taste of the young man. He had always thirsted for military adventure, and it is not surprising to hear that in his twentieth year, he purchased a commission as under-lieutenant in the Royal English Fusiliers. It may be noted in passing that this was a period in which commissions in the Army—since become an easy enough achievement—were practically the monopoly of men who were far superior by birth and social position to the sons of even the most princely merchants, and there is nothing to indicate that André's father was at all a man of more than moderate means. The point is interesting, however, inasmuch as it points to the psychological tendencies of the young man's mind. His commission duly obtained, André repaired at once to Berlin, where he received considerable insight into the military arts. Berlin, it may be parenthetically observed, was in those days probably the best-organised centre of a vast system of spies, for had not the collector of the famous giant-regiment of Potsdam Guards passed that way a generation before, and was not Frederick the Great still boasting that he had only one cook and a hundred spies? Some authorities incline to the belief that young André, while in Berlin, was already an active spy of the British Government. It is clear at any rate that when after a few years' residence in Germany he returned to England, he became known to prominent officers