[Illustration:  Mrs. Baden-Powell. 
    From a Painting by Hartmann.]

Mrs. Baden-Powell’s maiden name was Henrietta Grace Smyth.  Her father was a sturdy seaman, Admiral W.H.  Smyth, K.S.F., and fortunately for her children she was trained in a school where neither Murdstone rigour nor sentimental coddling was regarded as an essential.  She was the kind of mother that rears brave men and true.  For discipline she relied solely on her children’s sense of honour, and for the maintenance of her influence on their character she was content to trust to a never-wavering interest in all their sports, occupations, and hobbies.  Her children were encouraged to bear pain manfully, but they were not taught to crush their finer feelings.  A simple form of religion was inculcated, while the boys’ natural love for humour was encouraged and developed.  In a word, the children were allowed to grow up naturally, and the influence brought to bear upon them by this wise mother was as quiet and as imperceptible as Nature intended it to be.  Dean Stanley, Ruskin, Jowett, Tyndall, and Browning were among those who were wont to come and ply Mrs. Baden-Powell with questions as to how she managed to keep in such excellent control half-a-dozen boys filled to the brim with animal spirits.  The truth is, the boys were unconscious of any controlling influence in their lives, and how could they have anything but a huge respect for a mother whose knowledge of science and natural history enabled her to tell them things which they did not know?  In those days mothers were not content to commit the formation of their children’s minds to nursemaids and governesses.

The eldest boy became a Chief Judge in India, and lived to write what the Times described as “three monumental volumes on the Land Systems of British India.”  The second boy, Warington, of whom we shall have more to say in the next chapter, went into the Navy, but left that gallant Service to practise at the Bar, and now is as breezy a Q.C. as ever brought the smack of salt-water into the Admiralty Court.  The third son, Sir George Baden-Powell, sometime member of Parliament for Liverpool, had already entered upon a distinguished career when, to the regret of all who had marked his untiring devotion to Imperial affairs, his early death robbed the country of a loyal son.  The other brothers of our hero are Frank Baden-Powell, who took Honours at Balliol, and is a barrister of the Inner Temple, as well as a noted painter, and Baden F.S.  Baden-Powell, Major in the Scots Guards, whose war-kites at Modder River enabled Marconi’s staff to establish wireless telegraphy across a hundred miles of South Africa.  Among this family of young lions there was one little girl, Agnes, as keen about natural history as the rest, to whom her brothers were as earnestly and as passionately devoted as ever was Don Quixote to his Dulcinea.

And now to little Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell in knickerbockers and Holland jerkin.