wild
cat-skins and monkeys' tails swayed round his loins. His left hand
bore his assegais and knobkerrie beneath the great dappled ox-hide
shield; and in his right a yellow walking-staff. He stood for almost a
minute perfectly motionless, like a statue cast in bronze, his head
turned from me, listening for any suspicious sound. Then, with a swift
and easy movement, he laid his arms and shield noiselessly upon the
rocks, and, dropping on all fours beside a pool, he dipped his muzzle
down and drank just like an animal. I could hear the thirsty sucking
of his lips from where I lay. He drank and drank as though he never
meant to stop, and when at last his frame could hold no more, he rose
with evident reluctance. He picked his weapons up, and then stood
again to listen. Hearing nothing, he turned and sharply moved away. In
three swift strides he disappeared within the grass as silently as he
had come. I had been so taken with the spectacle that I felt no desire
to shoot at him--especially as he was carrying no gun himself." It is
little adventures of this kind, I think, which most impress one with
the romance and fascination of a scout's life.

On his solitary wanderings over the earth Baden-Powell has had many
narrow escapes of death, but none so near, perhaps, as that of an
excited native who, after an action, told B.-P. with bubbling
enthusiasm that a bullet had passed between his ear and his head!
Once Baden-Powell came unexpectedly upon a lion prepared to receive
him with open jaws, and but for perfectly steady nerves, which enabled
him at that critical moment to fire deliberately, he had never brought
home another lion's skin to decorate his mother's drawing-room in
London. Another narrow escape occurred during the Matabele campaign,
when Baden-Powell was quietly and peacefully marching by the side of a
mule battery. One of the mules had a carbine strapped on to its
pack-saddle, and by some extraordinary act of carelessness the weapon
had been left loaded, and at full-cock. Of course the first bush
passed by the battery fired the carbine, and Baden-Powell remarks of
the incident, "Many a man has nearly been shot by an ass, but I claim
to have been nearly shot by a mule."

It is Baden-Powell's habit to keep in perfect readiness at his London
house an entire kit for service abroad. The most methodical of men, he
has made a study of this important branch of a wanderer's service, and
when he sets out on his journeys he