L. Terhune
Seth Sprague Terry
John E. Thayer
Rev. James I. Vance
Dr. Henry Van Dyke
Adj. Gen. William Verbeck
John Wanamaker
Henry L. Ward
Lucien T. Warner
Richard Benedict Watrous
Rear Admiral J. C. Watson
W. D. Weatherford
Dr. Benjamin Ide Wheeler
Eli Whitney
Mornay Williams
Gen. George W. Wingate
A. E. Winship
Henry Rogers Winthrop
Major-Gen. Leonard Wood
Surgeon-Gen. Walter Wyman
Major Andrew C. Zabriskie

{x}

A MESSAGE FROM THE CHIEF SCOUT

TO THE BOY SCOUTS OF AMERICA:

There was once a boy who lived in a region of rough farms. He was wild
with the love of the green outdoors--the trees, the tree-top singers,
the wood-herbs and the live things that left their nightly tracks in
the mud by his spring well. He wished so much to know them and learn
about them, he would have given almost any price in his gift to know
the name of this or that wonderful bird, or brilliant flower; he used
to tremble with excitement and intensity of interest when some new
bird was seen, or when some strange song came from the trees to thrill
him with its power or vex him with its mystery, and he had a sad sense
of lost opportunity when it flew away leaving him dark as ever. But he
was alone and helpless, he had neither book nor friend to guide him,
and he grew up with a kind of knowledge hunger in his heart that
gnawed without ceasing. But this also it did: It inspired him with the
hope that some day he might be the means of saving others from this
sort of torment--he would aim to furnish to them what had been denied
to himself.

There were other things in the green and living world that had a
binding charm for him. He wanted to learn to camp out, to live again
the life of his hunter grandfather who knew all the tricks of winning
comfort from the relentless wilderness the foster-mother so rude to
those who fear her, so kind to the stout of heart.

And he had yet another hankering--he loved the touch of romance. When
he first found Fenimore Cooper's books, he drank them in as one
parched might drink at a spring. He reveled in the tales of courage
and heroic deeds, he gloated over records of their trailing and
scouting by red man and white; he gloried in their woodcraft, and
lived it all in imagination, secretly blaming the writer, a little,
for praising without describing it so it could be followed. "Some
day," he said, "I shall put it all down for other boys to learn."

As years went by he found that there were boo