Ste's other sterling
qualities that they seem to have been more impressed by his excellent
fooling than by any other of his good qualities. It is the greater
tribute to his genius for acting.

[Illustration: Rev. William Haig-Brown, LL.D.
Lombardi & Co., Photographers, 27, Sloane Street, S.W.]

So long as the world lasts, I suppose, the intelligent boy who works
hard at school will play the clown's part in popular fiction. Tom
Sawyer is the kind of youth we like to see given the chief part in a
novel, while George Washington, we are all agreed, is fit target for
our lofty scorn. But how few of the people we love to read about in
the airy realm of fiction, or the still airier realm of history,
really possess our hearts? Think over the heroes in novels who would
be drawn in with both hands to the fireside did they step out from
between covers and present themselves at our front door in flesh as
solid as the oak itself. And the good boy in fiction is anathema.
Shakespeare himself believed that

Love goes towards love, as schoolboys from their books;

and the man is regarded almost as un-English who would have the world
believe that there are British boys for whom the acquisition of
knowledge has almost the same attraction as for their heroes in
fiction has the acquisition of somebody's apples, or the tormenting of
helpless animals.

The fault is not with the world but with the silly writers of
goody-goody stories, who have so emasculated and effeminated the boy
who works hard and holds his head high that it is now well-nigh
impossible to hear of such an one in real life without instantly
setting him down as an intolerable prig. These writers have committed
the greatest crime against their creations that authors can
commit--they have made them non-human. If the stories about George
Washington had narrated how on one occasion he laughed uproariously,
or how he once ate too many mince-pies, he might have escaped the
lamentable and unjust reputation which seems likely to be his fate for
another aeon or two. That boys can be good and human everybody knows,
and the man who loves Tom Sawyer and sneers at Eric would be the first
to flog and abuse his son if he bore a closer resemblance to the
former than to the latter.

Baden-Powell as a boy was delightful. A grin always hovered about his
face, and the Spirit of Fun herself looked out of his sharp, brown
eyes. He was for ever making "the other chaps" roar; keeping