r it turns him into a scout, and drives
him out of the orderly-room, out of the barrack square, to wander in
Himalayan passes and ride across the deserts of Africa. Baden-Powell
is a nomad. The smart cavalry officer who can play any musical
instrument, draw amusing pictures, tell delightfully droll stories,
sing a good song, stage-manage theatricals--do everything, in short,
that qualifies a man to take his ease in country houses, loves more
than any other form of existence the loneliness and the wildness of
the scout's. Often, he tells us, when he is about the serious business
of handing teacups in London drawing-rooms, his mind flies off to some
African waste, to some lonely Indian hill, and straightway he longs
with all his soul to fling off the trappings of civilised society, and
be back again with nature, back again in the dear old flannel-shirt
life, living hard, with his life in his hand.

Once, after two months of wandering, he got into a hotel and, after
dinner, into a bed. But it would not do, he says; in a twinkling he
had whipped the blankets off the bed and was lying outside on mother
earth, with the rain beating upon his face, and deep in refreshing
slumber. The best of beds, according to B.-P., is "the veldt tempered
with a blanket and a saddle." When he is on his lonely wanderings he
always sleeps with his pistol under the "pillow" and the lanyard round
his neck. However soundly he sleeps, if any one comes within ten yards
of him, tread he never so softly, Baden-Powell wakes up without fail,
and with a brain cleared for action.

One of the sayings of Baden-Powell which I most like is that which
most reveals this side of his character. "A smile and a stick," says
he, "will carry you through any difficulty in the world." And he lives
in accordance with this principle; and it is typical of the man. Over
the world he goes on his solitary expeditions, hunting animals,
hunting men, making notes of what foreign armies are doing, what are
the chief thoughts occupying the minds of distant and dangerous
tribesmen, and he never goes about it blusteringly or with the Byronic
mystery of the stage detective. He trusts to his sense of humour--to
his smile--first; after that, and only when there is no hope for it,
do those hard jaws of his lock with a snap, the eyes light up with
resistless determination, and _whir-r-r_ goes the stick, and--well, it
requires a tough head to bear what follows.

[Illustration: The Fami