CHAPTER III

HOME LIFE AND HOLIDAYS

Baden-Powell is now called either “B.-P.” or “Bathing Towel.”  To his family he has always been Ste. This name, a contraction of Stephenson, was found for him by his big brothers in the days when home-made soldiers and birds’-nesting were life’s main business.

Ste, who we must record was born at 6 Stanhope Street, London, on the 22nd February 1857, and had the engineer Robert Stephenson for one of his godfathers, was educated at home until he was eleven years of age.  His parents had a great dread of overtaxing young brains, and lessons were never made irksome to any of their children.  Ste learned to straddle a pony very soon after he had mastered the difficult business of walking, and with long hours spent in the open in the lively companionship of his brothers he grew up in vigorous and healthy boyhood.  He had an enquiring mind, and never seemed to look upon lessons as a “fag.”  He was always “wanting to know,” and there was almost as much eagerness on the little chap’s part to be able to decline mensa and conjugate amo as he evinced in competing with his brothers in their sports and games.  Such was his gentle, placid nature that the tutor who looked after his work loved to talk with people about his charge, never tiring in reciting little instances of the boy’s delicacy of feeling and his intense eagerness to learn.  Mark well, Smith minor, that this is no little Paul Dombey of whom you are reading.  B.-P., so far as I can discover, never heard in the tumbling of foam-crested waves on the level sands of the sea-shore any mysterious message to his individual soul from the spirit world.  He was full of fun, full of the joy of life, and as “keen as mustard” on adventures of any kind.  His fun, however, was of the innocent order.  He was not like Cruel Frederick in Struwwelpeter, who (the little beast!) delighted in tearing the wings from flies and hurling brickbats at starving cats.  Baden-Powell would have kicked Master Frederick rather severely if he had caught him at any such mean business.  No, his fun took quite another form.  He was fond of what you call “playing the fool,” singing comic songs, learning to play tunes on every odd musical instrument he could find, and delighting his brothers by “taking off” people of their acquaintance.  B.-P., you must know, is a first-rate actor, and in his boyhood it was one of his chief delights to write plays for himself and his brothers to act.  Some of these plays were moderately clever, but all of them contained a screamingly funny part for the low comedian of the company—­our friend Ste himself.