of this labour was that in 1878 Baden-Powell passed the Garrison Class, taking a First Class and Extra Certificate (Star) for Topography.  During the lectures he distinguished himself by making inimitable caricatures, for which he was sometimes taken to task by the authorities.  Also he could not help poking fun at the examiners in the papers themselves.  Asked, “Do you know why so-and-so, and so-and-so?” Baden-Powell would write an interrogative “No.”

After distinguishing himself in this way, B.-P. came back to England, in order to go through the Musketry Course at Hythe.  Here he did equally well, taking a First Class Extra Certificate, and a year after we find him as Musketry Instructor at Quetta.  But this book is not intended to be a “biography” of Baden-Powell, and I shall beg leave to relate no chronological record of his military career.  We are telling his story as a story, hoping to interest every English schoolboy who has arrived at years of discretion, hoping to make them keen on sport, keen on exercise, keen on open-air life, and hoping, in addition, to be of real practical use to those whose eyes are now set hungrily on Sandhurst.

In a later chapter it will be seen how Baden-Powell interested himself in his men’s welfare, and how he encouraged them to become real soldiers—­learned in things other than mere boot-cleaning and button-polishing.  Here we behold him as the gay and dashing Hussar, a bold sportsman, a keen soldier, and one of the most popular men in India.

His popularity, it is only fair to say, was earned very largely by that gift for acting which had won him fame as a schoolboy.  Whispers that he was going to act in the Area Belle, or one of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas, travelled with amazing rapidity from station to station in India, and every performance in which he took part was attended by all the Europeans for miles round.  Indeed his fame as an actor travelled so far afield that the manager of a London theatre wrote to him in India offering our astonished hero a position in his company at a salary of ten pounds a week!  There is never an occasion when B.-P. is not willing to get up theatricals.  A few months after the siege of Kandahar he arranged for a performance of The Pirates of Penzance in that barbarous city, making himself responsible for the entire management.  The dresses were excellent, the stage and scenery good, and the opera was received with intense enthusiasm; and yet there was not a single European woman there; all the dresses and costumes were the work of B.-P., who himself appeared in the character of Ruth!  On another occasion, when Trial by Jury was to be given, it was discovered at the last moment, to the consternation of every one except B.-P., that there were no Royal arms.  In a few hours he produced what I am assured was the most splendid and gorgeous national emblazonry that ever sparkled behind footlights.  He had collected a few crude paints from the natives of the district,