hen he was in the 13th Hussars
he was always a favourite with the children in the married quarters,
and if you could pick out an apple-cheeked urchin playing in the dust
of the barracks who did not grin from ear to ear when you asked if he
knew Baden-Powell, you had stumbled upon a young gentleman the guest
of the regiment.

Baden-Powell even got to learn the names men gave their horses. There
was in the 13th Hussars some years ago a handsome little black horse
whose regimental number was, I think, A18. To the men he was Smut, and
no one ever thought of calling him anything else. One day at stables
the squad was called to attention, and the young soldier standing at
the head of A18 was mightily surprised to hear a civilian walking side
by side with the captain of his troop remark, as he passed up the
stable, "Why, there's old Smut!" When the officer and civilian had
passed out he turned to the next man, and asked who the deuce the
bloke was in the brown hat. "Why, that's Captain Baden-Powell," said
the man; and then he added with great pride, "I was his batman once."
The young soldier had heard of Baden-Powell before, and was furious
that he had not looked longer at him as he passed. An odd
circumstance, by the way, concerning the ex-batman. He was a terrible
fellow in many ways, always on the look-out for a fight, and in his
cups had disabled more than one policeman in the cities where the 13th
sojourned. But he kept in his box a little faded red book of
quotations, filled with serious and religious thoughts, and he was
particularly fond of two of these apothegms: the one, "A prayer is
merely a wish turned Godward"; and the other, "A grave wherever found
preaches a short and pithy sermon to the soul." He would quote them
over and over again in his confidential moments, and, though he might
pick out others as he turned the well-thumbed pages of that tiny book,
it was always to these two that he returned as perfect specimens of
great sayings. And that book, unless I am mistaken, was given to him
by Baden-Powell. "If I had been with him right along," he would say,
regretting some escapade, "I should have been a sergeant by this
time."

Baden-Powell's familiarity with the names of his men's horses reminds
one of his difficulty in swallowing horse-flesh during the hungry days
with the Shangani Patrol: "It is one thing to say, 'I'll trouble you
to pass the horse, please,' but quite another to say, 'Give me another
chunk o