in having to keep a good look-out for the enemy, enjoying splendid weather, shirt-sleeves, and a reviving feeling of health and freedom.”  So the man who had only just got off a sick-bed started for a ride into the forest after Ridley’s column, and during the ride the twentieth anniversary of his joining Her Majesty’s Service came round and brought its reflections for the diary.  “I always think more of this anniversary than of that of my birth, and I could not picture a more enjoyable way of spending it.  I am here, out in the wilds, with three troopers....  We are nearly eighty miles from Buluwayo and thirty from the nearest troops.  I have rigged up a shelter from the sun with my blanket, a rock, and a thorn-bush; thirteen thousand flies are, unfortunately, staying with me, and are awfully attentive....  I am looking out on the yellow veldt and the blue sky; the veldt with its grey hazy clumps of thorn-bush is shimmering in the heat, and its vast expanse is only broken by the gleaming white sand of the river-bed and the green reeds and bushes which fringe its banks.”  How could a man feel unhappy with the whole of his wardrobe packed away in one wallet of the saddle, and his larder in the other?  Be sure that Lucullus never enjoyed a banquet with the same sharpness of delight as Baden-Powell squatting amid the yellow grass of the veldt with his cocoa and rice.

But there were anxious moments coming for the man who kept on the open veldt the twentieth anniversary of his joining Her Majesty’s army with gladness in his heart.  After he had found the column and had got into the Lilliputian forest with its stunted, bushy trees and its sandy soil, he was brought face to face with the greatest enemy that can harass, fret, and wear down nerves of steel—­absence of water.  A commander whose mind is racked by the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of finding water for his troops is like the man haunted day and night, waking and sleeping, by debt.  “This was our menu,” says Baden-Powell:  “weak tea (can’t afford it strong), no sugar (we are out of it), a little bread (we have half a pound a day), Irish stew (consisting of slab of horse boiled in muddy water with a pinch of rice and half a pinch of pea-flour), salt, none.  For a plate I use one of my gaiters, it is marked ‘Tautz & Sons, No. 3031’; it is a far cry from veldt and horseflesh to Tautz and Oxford Street!” But this was at a time when B.-P. wrote in his diary:  “Nothing like looking at the cheery side of things.”  The morrow came when he could see nothing but arid miles of sand, when his eyes ached as they ranged the pitiless desert for water; there is no cheery side to that view.  Halting his party to give them a rest, he and an American scout named Gielgud started off to make one grand effort to find river or puddle.  Hill after hill was climbed to find only a valley of dead, baked grass beyond, and at last, broken-hearted and weary, the two riders turned their horses’ heads back to camp.  Soon after this the American’s