head began to bob till the chin rested on the chest, and he forgot the quest of water in the fairyland of dreams.  But B.-P. could not sleep, and those keen eyes of his were ranging the desolate country every dreary minute of that ride.  And at last he noticed on the ground certain marks which he knew to be those of a buck that had scratched in the sand for water.  Overjoyed he got down from the saddle and continued the work of the buck, digging and digging with his lean sunburnt fingers till he came to damp earth, and then—­to water.  At that moment he saw two pigeons get up from behind a rock some little way off, and leaving his oozing water in the sand he hastened there and discovered to his supreme joy the salvation of his party—­a little pool of water.

On this expedition you will be interested to hear that a man who lent valuable assistance to Baden-Powell was your hero of the cricket-field—­Major Poore.  In the days of the Matabele campaign he had not slogged Richardson out of the Oval, nor driven Hearne distracted to the ropes at Lord’s; he was there as Captain Poore of the 7th Hussars, working like a nigger, brave as a Briton, and quite delighted to be soldiering under the peerless Baden-Powell.  His fame came afterwards.

During this expedition Baden-Powell gave brilliant evidence of his capacity as a general.  He had drawn up a plan for an attack by his own and another column upon a great chief named Wedza, who lived with his warriors in a mountain consisting of six rocky peaks ranging from eight hundred to a thousand feet high.  On the top of these peaks were perched the kraals, while the mountain itself, nearly three miles long, resembled nothing so much as a rabbit-warren, being a network of caves held by the burrowing rebels.  Wedza’s stronghold was steep, and its sides were strewn with bush and boulders; only by narrow and difficult paths was it accessible, and these paths had been fortified by the Matabele with stockades and breastworks.  This important and well-nigh impregnable stronghold was held by something like sixteen hundred Matabele—­six or seven hundred of whom were real fighting men.  Baden-Powell, nevertheless, drew up his plan for the attack, and sat down to wait for the other column which was to act with him.  That column never came; only a letter arrived by runner saying that it would be unable to join in the attack after all.  “The only thing we could do,” says Baden-Powell, “was to try and bluff the enemy out of the place.”

So he arranged to win the battle by cunning of the brain.  Sending five-and-twenty men to climb a hill which commanded a part of the stronghold, with instructions to act as if they were two hundred and fifty, and giving small parties of Hussars similar instructions regarding the left flank and rear of the enemy, Baden-Powell got his artillery ready to bombard the central position.  Just as the five-and-twenty reached the summit of their hill, however, they were