nfused with smell of orchards.

Far from our tight little island must they journey for that inspiring
spell which turns the man of means into a wanderer upon the earth's
surface, driving him out of glittering London, with its twinkling
lights and its tinkling cabs, out of St. James's, and out of the club
arm-chair--out of all this, and wins him into the vast, drear, and
inhuman world, where men of our blood wage a ceaseless war with savage
nature. And it is when Baden-Powell packs his frock-coat into a
drawer, pops his shiny tall hat into a box, and slips exultingly into
a flannel shirt that the life of a scout seems to him the infinitely
best in the world. No man ever cared less for the mere ease of
civilisation than Baden-Powell.

CHAPTER VIII

THE FLANNEL-SHIRT LIFE

In _The Story of My Heart_ Richard Jefferies begins his enchanting
pages with the expression of that desire which every son of Adam feels
at times--the longing for wild, unartificial life. "My heart," he
says, "was dusty, parched for want of the rain of deep feeling; my
mind arid and dry, for there is a dust which settles on the heart as
well as that which falls on a ledge.... A species of thick clothing
slowly grows about the mind, the pores are choked, little habits
become part of existence, and by degrees the mind is inclosed in a
husk." Then he goes on to tell of a hill to which he resorted at such
moments of intellectual depression, and of the sensations that
thrilled him as he moved up the sweet short turf. The very light of
the sun, he says, was whiter and more brilliant there, and standing on
the summit his jaded heart revived, and "obtained a wider horizon of
feeling." Thoreau, too, went to the woods because he wanted to live
deliberately, and front only the essential facts of life. "I wanted to
live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and
Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad
swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to
its lowest terms."

This longing for a return to nature in minds less imaginative than
Thoreau's and Jefferies' results in globe-trotting or
colonisation--according to circumstances,--it wakes the gipsy in our
blood, be we gentle or simple, and sends us wandering over the waste
places of the earth in quest of glory, adventure, or a gold
mine--anything so long as it entails wandering. When it stirs in the
mind of the disciplined soldie