h of grass or
the cracking of a twig, he goes alone in and out of the mountains
where the savages who have marked him down are asleep by the side of
their assegais, or repeating stories of the dreadful Wolf over their
bivouac fires. This is the life which has most attractions for
Baden-Powell, and if he had not been locked up in Mafeking all through
those precious months at the beginning of the war, it is no idle
guesswork to say that we should have lost fewer men and fewer guns by
surprise and ambuscade.

In this flannel-shirt life, however, Baden-Powell is not always on the
serious emprise of soldiering. Most of his holidays, at any rate while
he is abroad, are spent in shirt-sleeves. His periods of rest from the
duties of soldiering are given over to expeditions which carry him far
away from the smooth fields and trim hedges of civilisation; he is for
ever trying to get face to face with nature, living the untrammelled
romantic life of a hunter, independent of slaughterman,
market-gardener, and tax-collector. In his boyhood, as we saw, he
loved few things more than "exploring," and now he has but exchanged
the woods of Tunbridge Wells for the Indian Jungle and the Welsh
mountains for the Matopos.

Happy the man who carries with him into middle-age the zest and aims
of a clean boyhood. There is something invigorating, almost inspiring,
in the contemplation of Baden-Powell's meridian of life. The fifties
which gave him birth seem now to belong to a remote and benighted era;
and the blindest of his unknown adorers, if she has bought a hatless
photograph, cannot deny that Time's effacing fingers have something
roughly swept the brow where she could wish his hair still
lingered,--and yet at forty-three, Baden-Powell, Colonel of Dragoons,
goes wandering into bush and prairie, striding by stream and striking
up mountain, with all the eagerness, all the keenness, all the
abandonment of the gummy-fingered boy seeking butterflies and birds'
eggs. For him life is as good now as it was with big brother
Warington. He is up with the lark, his senses clear and awake from the
moment the cold water goes streaming over his head; there is no
"lazing" with him, no beefy-mindedness, no affectation and effeminacy.
And I cannot help thinking that if the decadents of our day--for
whose distress of soul only the stony-hearted could express
contempt--would but for a week or two lay aside their fine linen,
donning in its place the magic fla