is chest out another inch and straightway purchase
out of his pay spurs that jingle more musically when he goes abroad
than the miserable things served out by an unromantic Government.
Other legends there are in this regiment, and once Baden-Powell and
his great friend, Captain MacLaren (known to the officers as "The
Boy," to the men as "The Little Prince"), set about compiling its
history; but for some reason or another that work has not yet
appeared, and since its inception B.-P. has deserted to the
Dragoons--_Vestigia nulla retrorsum!_

Baden-Powell became popular with his brother-officers directly he
joined. It was his freshness, his overflowing good spirits, his hearty
and unmistakable enjoyment of life, that first won their regard. The
boy suddenly dropped into their midst was no blase youth, no mere
swaggering puppy. He was afire with the joy of existence, radiant with
happiness, excited--and not ashamed to show it--by all the newness and
fascination of Indian life. The Major screwed his eye-glass into his
eye and smiled encouragingly; the Adjutant measured him with peg to
his lip and knew he would do. Every one felt that the new sub was an
acquisition.

But it must not be supposed that there was any "bounce" about the new
boy. Apart from his breeding and training, which would effectually
prevent a man from committing the unpardonable sin of the social
world, Baden-Powell by nature was, and still is, a little bashful.
There are people who pooh-pooh the very idea of such a thing, and
declare that the man they have heard act and sing and play the fool is
no more nervous than a bishop among curates. Nevertheless they are
wrong; and your humble servant entirely right. B.-P., like the other
members of his family, suffers from nervousness, and when he goes on
the stage to act, and sits down at the piano to "vamp," it is a sheer
triumph of will over nerves. He is not nervous under the wide and
starry sky, not bashful when he pricks his horse into the long grass
of the veldt and bears down upon a bunch of bloodthirsty savages, not
nervous when he gets a child on his knee all by himself and tells her
delightful stories,--but nervous as a boy on his first day at school
when he finds himself being lionised in a drawing-room, or picked out
of the ruck of guests for any particular notice. And so when he joined
the 13th, behind the ebullient spirits was this innate bashfulness,
which, added to the natural modesty of a gentle