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I’ll want fifteen thousand pounds. Well?”
    I was inclined to think that the offer might be genuine, but I was convinced that, in view of the exorbitant price he was asking, nothing could come of it, particularly since he seemed to expect us to buy the papers sight unseen. I made a mental note to stress the inordinate risk in the memo that I would have to write about all this. I was certain the offer would be turned down.
    Nevertheless we agreed that he should telephone me at my office on the 30th day of October at three o’clock. We also agreed that in the event of his offer being accepted we would meet near the toolshed at the end of the Embassy garden.
    After these details had been arranged he asked me to switch out all the lights in the hall and on the stairs. He wished to leave the house under cover of complete darkness.
    I complied with his request. When I came back to the drawing-room he had put on his overcoat and his hat, which was pulled down low over his eyes. It was past midnight by now.
    I stood at the door to let him pass. He suddenly gripped my arm, and hissed in my ear:
    â€œYou’d like to know who I am? I’m the British Ambassador’s valet.”
    Without awaiting my reaction to this he stepped out into the darkness.
    Thus ended my first meeting with the man who, a few days later, was given the code name of Cicero.
    L. C. MOYZISCH

5. THE VALUE OF HIDE-AND-SEEK
    he game of hide-and-seek is really one of the best games for a boy, and can be elaborated until it becomes scouting in the field. It teaches you a lot.
    I was strongly addicted to it as a child, and the craft learned in that innocent field of sport has stood me in good stead in many a critical time since. To lie flat in a furrow among the currant bushes when I had not time to reach the neighbouring boxbushes before the pursuer came in sight taught me the value of not using the most obvious cover, since it would at once be searched. The hunters went at once to the box bushes as the likely spot, while I could watch their doings from among the stems of the currant bushes.
    Often I have seen hostile scouts searching the obvious bits of cover, but they did not find
me
there; and, like the elephant hunter among the fern trees, or a boar in a cotton crop, so a boy in the currant bushes is invisible to the enemy, while he can watch every move of the enemy’s legs.
    This I found of value when I came to be pursued by mounted military police, who suspected me of being a spy at some manoeuvres abroad.
    SIR ROBERT BADEN-POWELL

6. TAKE A HARD-BOILED EGG
    ake a spot of lemon juice. Use a perfectly clean nib. Dip it into the lemon and write the message on a piece of paper. Allow the juice to dry and there will be nothing to be seen. Run a hot iron over the paper and the writing will return—faint and light brown in shade.
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    Take a clean nib and dip it in water—or merely write with the dry nib on the paper. The nib will make minute scratches on the paper—invisible to the naked eye, but easily seen under the microscope. An iodine vapour bath can also be used. This is a simpleapparatus—a tin oven in which iodine is maintained at the lowest temperature at which it will remain vapourised. The letter is introduced into the bath, and when it is withdrawn after a few minutes crystals of iodine will have settled along the tiny rough edges formed by the scratch of the nib.
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    Naphthol, collodion and acetone in the proportions of one, twenty, sixty. For the reagent, five grains of sulphuric acid are mixed with fifty cubic centimetres of nitric acid in a litre of water and added cold to one gramme of sodium nitrate. Fifty grammes of sodium acetate are then dissolved in two hundred cubic centimetres of water. The paper is dipped in a mixture of a hundred cubic centimetres of the first solution and twenty cubic centimetres of the second solution.
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    A mixture of brandy and milk.
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    Take a hard-boiled egg.