In 1867, Major Le Caron, freed from military service, was looking around him for the means of maintaining his family, and in the course of a visit to England, was instructed by the British Government to ally himself with the Fenian organisation in America, "in order," as he frankly admits, "to play the rôle of spy in the rebel ranks." His adventurous nature welcomed the work as congenial, he says, while his British instincts made him a willing worker from a sense of right. Accordingly, on his return to America, he offered his services as a military man to General O'Neill, who was to lead the anti-British forces in the event of another uprising. On his cordial acceptance by O'Neill, as well as initiation, on his solemn oath, into the Fenian Brotherhood under that soldier's sponsorship, Le Caron returned to his Western home and lost no time "in commencing to lead my double life," as he puts it. At Lockport, Illinois, he set about the organisation of a Fenian "circle" in which he took the position officially known by the title of "center," or commander, a post which entitled him to receive all official reports and communications issued by O'Neill. These reports were duly transmitted to London by the Major and one pauses here to reflect that in this supplementary office Le Caron might not inappropriately have borne the subsidiary title of "scenter." The soul of the Major was clearly one of no ordinary beauty and versatility, for in order to supplement his gains as a secret-service agent, he accepted about this time a comfortable post as hospital steward in a vast gaol in Illinois. Here, he naïvely admits, he felt at home, because, as he writes, "in such a vast assembly of criminals, there were many whose characters and careers formed subjects for very interesting study to me. I was fortunate in being connected with the prison at a time when some more than usually clever and facile scoundrels were temporarily resident there." O'Neill was, however, on the look-out for energetic agents, and Le Caron was not suffered to remain long in the comparatively inactive life of an Illinois gaol. In response to a telegram from headquarters, he proceeded hurriedly—and apparently without giving due notice to his employers—to New York, where he was engaged as "major and military organiser of the Irish Republican Army," at a salary equivalent to £650 a year, a rare exchange for the few pounds he was being paid weekly as a prison official in Illinois. With his commission he received instructions to proceed on an organising tour, in the course of which, the Major learned, to his deep disgust, that he was expected to address public meetings as a sworn advocate of the Irish cause. He knew nothing whatever about Irish politics and was well aware that ignorance of Irish aspirations meant, in the opinion of most Irishmen, wholesale indifference, which was hardly worse than active hostility itself. Once, indeed, he found himself in a tight fix which called for all the undoubted nerve the spy possessed. The occasion was a Convention of the Fenian Brotherhood at Williamsburg. The Major tells the story in the course of his autobiography in the following words:—