the accredited correspondent of the Noo York Sentinel and used to
go with the rest of the bunch to the pow-wows of under-secretaries
of State and War Office generals. They censored my stuff so cruel
that the paper fired me. Then I went on a walking-tour round
England and sat for a fortnight in a little farm in Suffolk. By and
by I came back to Claridge's and this bookshop, for I had learned
most of what I wanted.

'I had learned,' he went on, turning his curious, full, ruminating
eyes on me, 'that the British working-man is about the soundest
piece of humanity on God's earth. He grumbles a bit and jibs a bit
when he thinks the Government are giving him a crooked deal, but
he's gotten the patience of job and the sand of a gamecock.
And he's gotten humour too, that tickles me to death. There's not
much trouble in that quarter for it's he and his kind that's beating
the Hun ... But I picked up a thing or two besides that.'

He leaned forward and tapped me on the knee. 'I reverence the
British Intelligence Service. Flies don't settle on it to any
considerable extent. It's got a mighty fine mesh, but there's one hole in
that mesh, and it's our job to mend it. There's a high-powered brain in
the game against us. I struck it a couple of years ago when I was
hunting Dumba and Albert, and I thought it was in Noo York, but
it wasn't. I struck its working again at home last year and located
its head office in Europe. So I tried Switzerland and Holland, but
only bits of it were there. The centre of the web where the old
spider sits is right here in England, and for six months I've been
shadowing that spider. There's a gang to help, a big gang, and a
clever gang, and partly an innocent gang. But there's only one
brain, and it's to match that that the Robson Brothers settled my