The selection of the higher class of spy, in these days, is very largely a matter of chance. Almost in every case the man selected must be bi-lingual, while, if he has three languages at his command, so much the better for him--and for his employers. In purely military espionage, that which concerns plans of fortifications, estimates of strength and movements, topographical surveying, ascertaining the character of officers, and the possibility of influencing them either by bribery or blackmail, and general secret-service work likely to be of service to the Great German General Staff, capable and clever men must be selected. The "German waiter" of melodramatic fancy has little part in this class of work; for one thing, a waiter has to perform stated work at stated times, and he is liable to suspicion being cast on him if he is a man of irregular habits or is in any way unable to account naturally for his spare time. The clerk in an office is subject to the same disabilities, and as a whole it may be said that the clerk and waiter class, if they are engaged in espionage at all, are the small fry of minor supernumeraries, agents acting on behalf of the spies who pay them, instead of spies in the direct employ of the German Government. They are not given such work as would involve their possessing enough knowledge to make them dangerous in themselves, and are not the class whose work need cause uneasiness. The real spy needs all his time and all his freedom of movement, and he is placed in such a position that he has these to the full. His training is a hard schooling of months. To be efficient for his work, he must be a qualified surveyor, able to make plans of areas of ground from observation and often without instruments; he must, at the same time, be a capable photographer, for obvious reasons. He must be able to judge distances under all conditions of weather and light--as an instance of this may be mentioned the fully authenticated case of the spy who was set to study the Forth Bridge, and who was expected to supply his Government with full details of the bridge, of how men could be placed with a view to its instant destruction at a given signal, of the geological nature of the land into which the foundations of the bridge were built, and of the quantities of explosive required to reduce the structure. The man selected to obtain this information had to accomplish his task without arousing suspicion; he had to judge his distances solely by pacing, observing angles, and subsequent triangulation, and in this respect his work was perfectly accurate, for he judged the distances to a matter of yards and heights to the foot. Though these coincided with information at the disposal of any member of the public, apparently the Great German General Staff placed no faith in published information, or at least wanted it confirmed.