secrecy; but I can indicate that I was sent to Italy to pick up
facts in the dockyards there, and that our people relied on my gifts of
disguise, and on my knowledge of Italian, learnt upon Italian ships and
in Italian ports. In short, I was expected to provide plans and
accounts of many things material to our own service, and I entered on
the business with alacrity, gained admittance to the public dockyards,
and knew in a twelve-month all that any man could learn who had his
wits only to guide him, and as much of those of other men as he could
pick up.

"But I imagine your natural impatience, and your mental exclamation,
'What has all this rigmarole to do with me--how does it affect this
pretended narrative?' Bear with me a moment when I tell you that it is
vital to my story. It was in Italy during my second year of work that I
had cause to be at Spezia, inspecting there a new type of gun-boat
about which there was much talk and many opinions. I have no need to
tell you, who have not the bombastic knowledge of a one-city man, that
at Spezia is to be found all that is great in the naval life of Italy;
on the grand forts of the bay which received the ashes of Shelley are
her finest guns; on the glorious hills which arise above her limpid
blue waters are her chief fortifications. There, at the feet of the
hills where grows the olive, and where the vine matures to luxurious
growth, you will find in juxtaposition with Nature's emblems of peace
the storehouses of the shot and shell which one day shall sow the sea
and the land with blood. Amongst these fortifications, amidst these
adamantine terraces and turrets, my work lay; but the most part of it
was done in the dockyards, both in the yards which were the property of
the Government and in the private yards. My recreation was a rare
cruise to the lovely gulfs which the bay embosoms, to the Casa di Mare,
to Fezzano, to the Temple of Venus at the Porto Venere; or a walk when
there was golden-red light on the clustering vines, and the Apennines
were capped with the spreading fire which falls on them when the sun
passes low at twilight. Many an hour I stood above the old town, asking
why a common cheat of a spy, as I reckoned myself, should presume to
find other thoughts when breathing that air laden of solitude; but they
came to me whether I would or no; and it was often on my mind to throw
over the whole business of prying; and to set out on a work which
should achieve someth