to indicate either that Burleigh and Walsingham were not very astute judges of the common spy, or else that "J. B." was devilishly apt in extracting large sums out of credulous statesmen and diplomats, for it is written that having raised many thousands from Poulet on his simple promise to capture an agent of Mary Stuart, whose papers were certain to incriminate that Queen—why, the rascal failed to deliver goods, to use another expressive newspaper Americanism. Then there was the informer Gifford whose early training as a priest enabled him, in his clerical capacity and with forged credentials, to spy on the great Catholic families of his time, in all cases transmitting false yet incriminating information to Burleigh. His nefarious activities brought at least a dozen men to the execution block in those days. In two years another of the species, one Thomas Phillips, also an ex-Intelligencer, had contracted to the Crown a debt equal to the large sum of £60,000 of our own money on account of infamous work done for its ministers, mostly political, be it said. Indeed, the record of the Elizabethan spy constitutes one long chronicle of the bloodiest treachery in the whole history of secret service, since the Tower, if not Tyburn, invariably figured as the last scene in the life of the unfortunate who fell into the hands of the Queen's sleuths. Treachery seems, for all the halo which surrounds our notion of the "good old days," to have played a part in the whole social fabric as universal as it was sinister, nor can the fact be wondered at, seeing that the promiscuous distribution of the confiscated estates of murdered men, which often in a day rewarded poor men with vast lands, was an ever-present incentive to the cupidity of the adventurer.