arch, can set down.

Now, these people among whom I live are proud of their phrase, 'The
Englishman's house is his castle,' and into that castle even a
policeman cannot penetrate without a legal warrant. This may be all
very well in theory, but if you are compelled to march up to a man's
house, blowing a trumpet, and rattling a snare drum, you need not be
disappointed if you fail to find what you are in search of when all
the legal restrictions are complied with. Of course, the English are a
very excellent people, a fact to which I am always proud to bear
testimony, but it must be admitted that for cold common sense the
French are very much their superiors. In Paris, if I wish to obtain an
incriminating document, I do not send the possessor a _carte postale_
to inform him of my desire, and in this procedure the French people
sanely acquiesce. I have known men who, when they go out to spend an
evening on the boulevards, toss their bunch of keys to the concierge,
saying,--

'If you hear the police rummaging about while I'm away, pray assist
them, with an expression of my distinguished consideration.'

I remember while I was chief detective in the service of the French
Government being requested to call at a certain hour at the private
hotel of the Minister for Foreign Affairs. It was during the time that
Bismarck meditated a second attack upon my country, and I am happy to
say that I was then instrumental in supplying the Secret Bureau with
documents which mollified that iron man's purpose, a fact which I
think entitled me to my country's gratitude, not that I ever even
hinted such a claim when a succeeding ministry forgot my services. The
memory of a republic, as has been said by a greater man than I, is
short. However, all that has nothing to do with the incident I am
about to relate. I merely mention the crisis to excuse a momentary
forgetfulness on my part which in any other country might have been
followed by serious results to myself. But in France--ah, we
understand those things, and nothing happened.

I am the last person in the world to give myself away, as they say in
the great West. I am usually the calm, collected Eugene Valmont whom
nothing can perturb, but this was a time of great tension, and I had
become absorbed. I was alone with the minister in his private house,
and one of the papers he desired was in his bureau at the Ministry for
Foreign Affairs; at least, he thought so, and said,--

'Ah, it is