But it is not only on set occasions that Baden-Powell practises scouting.  He rarely takes a walk, boards a ’bus, or enters a train, without finding opportunity for some subtle inductive reasoning.  Thus he recommends the men in his regiment to notice closely any stranger with whom they may come in contact, guess what their professions and circumstances are, and then, getting into conversation, find out how near the truth their surmises have been.  Therefore, dear reader, if you find yourself in a few months’ time drifting into conversation with a good-looking, bronzed stranger, this side of fifty, who puts rather pointed questions to you, after having studied your thumbs, boots, and whiskers intently, take special delight in leading him harmlessly astray, for thereby you may be beating, with great glory to yourself, the “Wolf that never Sleeps.”

The joy of a walk in the country is heightened, I think, by following the example of Baden-Powell, and paying attention to the tracks on the ground.  It would be an uncanny day for England when every man turned himself into a Sherlock Holmes, but there is no man who might not with advantage to himself practise scouting in the Essex forests or on the Surrey hills.  The world is filled with life, and yet people go rambling through fields and woods without having seen anything more exciting than a couple of rabbits and a few blackbirds.

The chief joy of scouting, however, is not to be found in what Baden-Powell calls “dear, drowsy, after-lunch Old England.”  They who would seek it must go far from this “ripple of land,” far from

    The happy violets hiding from the roads,
    The primroses run down to, carrying gold,—­
    The tangled hedgerows, where the cows push out
    Impatient horns and tolerant churning mouths
    ’Twixt dripping ash-boughs,—­hedgerows all alive
    With birds and gnats and large white butterflies
    Which look as if the May-flower had caught life
    And palpitated forth upon the wind,—­
    Hills, vales, woods, netted in a silver mist,
    Farms, granges, doubled up among the hills,
    And cattle grazing in the watered vales,
    And cottage-chimneys smoking from the woods,
    And cottage-gardens smelling everywhere,
    Confused with smell of orchards.

Far from our tight little island must they journey for that inspiring spell which turns the man of means into a wanderer upon the earth’s surface, driving him out of glittering London, with its twinkling lights and its tinkling cabs, out of St. James’s, and out of the club arm-chair—­out of all this, and wins him into the vast, drear, and inhuman world, where men of our blood wage a ceaseless war with savage nature.  And it is when Baden-Powell packs his frock-coat into a drawer, pops his shiny tall hat into a box, and slips exultingly into a flannel shirt that the life of a scout seems to him the infinitely best in the world.  No man ever cared less for the mere ease of civilisation than Baden-Powell.