Your police courts, your divorce courts, your war--they yield interest in ratio to the misfortune of one party or the other. Our great victory is your great defeat, the liberation by the Divorce Court of this woman is the exposure of that, startling crimes attract only by the measure of the anguish they impose. In war, when neither army is destroying the other we vote the news dull, and so I think would you describe the faithful record of my commonplace days when all went as smoothly and as evenly as the routine of a well-organized business. And, after all, the spy’s work is more often than not the most dull and boring of work. One of my men spent eight weeks in timber yards, checking the supplies of box-wood and keeping track of its destination. When a certain noble lord in charge of a great national factory bought up all the box-wood, we knew by the extent of his purchases that the work which was being done in his well-guarded factory was shell-filling on a vast scale. Here then was a form of “espionage” without adventure, humdrum, soul-destroying and to all appearance unprofitable. There is no material for narrative here, good friends. There is nothing of the bizarre, nothing of the flash, the sparkle, and the thrill of the work. Therefore, I do not offend you with the banal trivialities of my profession, otherwise I might present what was little more than a catalogue of appointments. As for example: March 3rd. 10 o’clock.--Saw Hefferich and took report of spare ties and sleepers held by G.W. & C. Ry. 10.15.--Phone message from Stael to say that there was a case of bubonic plague reported at Gravesend (East India liner _Ratapore_.) 10.20.--Phone from Casey _re_ proscribed meeting at Connemara. 10.30.--Phone weather report from Aberdeen. 10.33.--Phone weather report from Llandudno. 10.35.--Weather report from Southsea. 10.38.--Saw van Heerden _re_ butter shipments for February. and so and so forth. Yes, I was a weather bureau, and daily transmitted the barometer reading to Germany--useful information for our air service. Many informative isobars would have been absent from the German meteorological charts but for the industry and organization of Heine! I have my critics and my enemies. Particularly do I single out amongst the latter, Trade-Councillor Karl Wesselsmanns, of Hamburg, on the staff of _Vorwarts_, who had the impertinence to write in his crude language and un-German spirit that “the work of the Secret Service in England was distinguished by bungling and stupidity. Whoever was in control of that work seemed to spend his time getting Germans into trouble and produced very few satisfactory results that are worthy of notice.”