In this flannel-shirt life, however, Baden-Powell is not always on the serious emprise of soldiering.  Most of his holidays, at any rate while he is abroad, are spent in shirt-sleeves.  His periods of rest from the duties of soldiering are given over to expeditions which carry him far away from the smooth fields and trim hedges of civilisation; he is for ever trying to get face to face with nature, living the untrammelled romantic life of a hunter, independent of slaughterman, market-gardener, and tax-collector.  In his boyhood, as we saw, he loved few things more than “exploring,” and now he has but exchanged the woods of Tunbridge Wells for the Indian Jungle and the Welsh mountains for the Matopos.

Happy the man who carries with him into middle-age the zest and aims of a clean boyhood.  There is something invigorating, almost inspiring, in the contemplation of Baden-Powell’s meridian of life.  The fifties which gave him birth seem now to belong to a remote and benighted era; and the blindest of his unknown adorers, if she has bought a hatless photograph, cannot deny that Time’s effacing fingers have something roughly swept the brow where she could wish his hair still lingered,—­and yet at forty-three, Baden-Powell, Colonel of Dragoons, goes wandering into bush and prairie, striding by stream and striking up mountain, with all the eagerness, all the keenness, all the abandonment of the gummy-fingered boy seeking butterflies and birds’ eggs.  For him life is as good now as it was with big brother Warington.  He is up with the lark, his senses clear and awake from the moment the cold water goes streaming over his head; there is no “lazing” with him, no beefy-mindedness, no affectation and effeminacy.  And I cannot help thinking that if the decadents of our day—­for whose distress of soul only the stony-hearted could express contempt—­would but for a week or two lay aside their fine linen, donning in its place the magic flannel shirt of Baden-Powell, they would find not only a happy issue to their jaundice, but even discover that the world is a good place for a man to spend his days in—­if he but live like a man.

Hear Baden-Powell on this subject, and get a glimpse of his serious side, which so seldom peeps out for the world to see:  “Old Oliver Wendell Holmes,” he says, “is only too true when he says that most of us are ‘boys all our lives’; we have our toys, and will play with them with as much zest at eighty as at eight, that in their company we can never grow old.  I can’t help it if my toys take the form of all that has to do with veldt life, and if they remain my toys till I drop.

    “Then here’s to our boyhood, its gold and its grey,
    The stars of its winter, the dews of its May;
    And when we have done with our life-lasting toys,
    Dear Father, take care of Thy children, the boys.

“May it not be that our toys are the various media adapted to individual tastes through which men may know their God?  As Ramakrishna Paramahansa writes:  ’Many are the names of God, and infinite the forms that lead us to know of Him.  In whatsoever name or form you desire to know Him, in that very name and form you will know Him.’”