the ground with its signs is at once his book, his map, and his newspaper.  Remember the volume of meaning contained in the single print of Friday’s foot on Crusoe’s beach.”  And so he advises officers in India to go with a native tracker to the jungle and watch him and learn from him “the almost boundless art of deducing and piecing together correctly information to be gathered from the various signs found.”  The importance of tracking, and the art of it, is shown in an interesting story which B.-P. tells, a story which demonstrates the close relationship of hunter and scout.  A sportsman in India was out tiger-shooting early one morning, with two professional trackers walking in front of his elephant, and the usual company of beaters behind.  As they went along, the fresh pugs of a tiger were seen on the ground, but the professional trackers passed on without so much as a sign of having noticed the spoor.  In a minute the beaters were up with the professionals, asking, with Asiatic irony, if they had eyes in their professional heads.  To which one of the trackers merely replied, “Idiots! at what time do rats run about?” And then the humbled coolies went back to look at the spoor again, and there they saw, after a close scrutiny, the delicate tracing of a little field-rat’s feet over the mighty pugs of Stripes.  This rat only comes out of its hole early in the night, and retires long before the Eastern day begins, so that several hours had elapsed since the tiger journeyed that way, and the professional was a better man than the amateur.

Baden-Powell has all the qualifications that go to make a good scout.  His eye is as keen as the hawk’s, and many a time “by keeping his eyes skinned” he has done useful, if unobtrusive, work.  Once he was riding in the night with despatches for headquarters’ camp, guiding himself by the stars.  Arriving at the place where he thought the camp ought to be, he was surprised to find no sign of it.  Dismounting from his saddle, he was thinking of lying up for the night (rather than overshoot the mark) when a distant spark, for the fraction of a second, caught his eye.  Jumping into the saddle again, he rode towards the place where the spark had flickered its brief moment, and there he found a sentry smoking a pipe.  The red glow of the baccy in the bowl had guided B.-P. with his despatches safely to camp.

But not always does Baden-Powell see what he says he sees.  On one occasion in Kashmir he was matching his eyes against a shikari, and the story of the contest is related by B.-P. in his Aids to Scouting (published by Gale and Polden, London and Aldershot):  “He pointed out a hillside some distance off, and asked me if I could see how many cattle there were grazing on it.  It was only with difficulty that I could see any cattle at all, but presently I capped him by asking him if he could see the man in charge of the cattle.  Now, I could not actually see this myself, but knowing that there must be a man with the herd, and that he would probably be up-hill above them somewhere, and as there was a solitary tree above them (and it was a hot, sunny day), I guessed he would be under this tree.”  And when the incredulous shikari looked through the field-glasses he marvelled at the vision of the white man—­the herdsman was under the tree as happy as a hen in a dust-bath.  The uses of inductive reasoning!