he had entirely missed. Instead, he read in what I said the admiration
of the amateur for the professional. He saw what he believed to be a
high agent of the Government treating him as a worthy antagonist. In no
other way can I explain his later heaping upon me his confidences. It
was the vanity of a child trying to show off.

In ten days, in the limited area of a two-thousand-ton steamer, one
could not help but learn something of the history of so communicative a
fellow-passenger as Schnitzel. His parents were German and still
lived in Germany. But he himself had been brought up on the East Side.
An uncle who kept a delicatessen shop in Avenue A had sent him to the
public schools and then to a "business college," where he had developed
remarkable expertness as a stenographer. He referred to his skill in
this difficult exercise with pitying contempt. Nevertheless, from a room
noisy with typewriters this skill had lifted him into the private office
of the president of the Nitrate Trust. There, as Schnitzel expressed it,
"I saw 'mine,' and I took it." To trace back the criminal instinct that
led Schnitzel to steal and sell the private letters of his employer was
not difficult. In all of his few early years I found it lying latent. Of
every story he told of himself, and he talked only of himself, there was
not one that was not to his discredit. He himself never saw this, nor
that all he told me showed he was without the moral sense, and with an
instinctive enjoyment of what was deceitful, mean, and underhand. That,
as I read it, was his character.

[Illustration: Schnitzel was smiling to himself]

In appearance he was smooth-shaven, with long locks that hung behind
wide, protruding ears. He had the unhealthy skin of bad blood, and his
eyes, as though the daylight hurt them, constantly opened and shut. He