Women, it is interesting to learn, from high authorities on the arts of espionage, are rarely effective or satisfactory agents in secret service. Not, it must be understood, that woman is incapable of the requisite baseness that is, in the successful spy, an indispensable quality. Far from it. Goethe, who was a competent judge of the sex, has placed on record his view that woman, when intent on turpitude, is capable of sounding lower depths than the vilest of the male species. German experts are, however, unanimous in eliminating to a minimum point the services of women as spies, and that too on the ground that they are rarely to be relied upon if once romantic sentiment becomes engaged in their operations—an ever-present possibility. "Any woman but a German woman" was a common cry of Karl Stieber who may be trusted to have well understood the character of his fair compatriot, for whom love and romance—the purer the better—constitute the only things worth living for in this drab enough world. Indeed, the famous Salic Law is said to have owed its first enacting mainly to the fact that German women were as a rule found to be unreliable, shall we say? where their intimate feelings were apt to become involved, and those who have resided in Germany will not require to be told that a handsome face and a brave air, added to a romantic bent, go very much further with women in the land of beer, love and song than with their sisters in perhaps any other country in the world. The work of the efficient spy involves, it is clear, a peculiar but none the less specific proportioning of analytical and synthetical qualities of brain-work, and while the feminine mind, which works mainly on its intuitions, may be described as wholly of a synthetic calibre, it has, except in the rarest cases, of analytical faculties—the ability for properly appraising and forecasting causes and effects—the very poorest provision.