This longing for a return to nature in minds less imaginative than Thoreau's and Jefferies' results in globe-trotting or colonisation--according to circumstances,--it wakes the gipsy in our blood, be we gentle or simple, and sends us wandering over the waste places of the earth in quest of glory, adventure, or a gold mine--anything so long as it entails wandering. When it stirs in the mind of the disciplined soldier it turns him into a scout, and drives him out of the orderly-room, out of the barrack square, to wander in Himalayan passes and ride across the deserts of Africa. Baden-Powell is a nomad. The smart cavalry officer who can play any musical instrument, draw amusing pictures, tell delightfully droll stories, sing a good song, stage-manage theatricals--do everything, in short, that qualifies a man to take his ease in country houses, loves more than any other form of existence the loneliness and the wildness of the scout's. Often, he tells us, when he is about the serious business of handing teacups in London drawing-rooms, his mind flies off to some African waste, to some lonely Indian hill, and straightway he longs with all his soul to fling off the trappings of civilised society, and be back again with nature, back again in the dear old flannel-shirt life, living hard, with his life in his hand. Once, after two months of wandering, he got into a hotel and, after dinner, into a bed. But it would not do, he says; in a twinkling he had whipped the blankets off the bed and was lying outside on mother earth, with the rain beating upon his face, and deep in refreshing slumber. The best of beds, according to B.-P., is "the veldt tempered with a blanket and a saddle." When he is on his lonely wanderings he always sleeps with his pistol under the "pillow" and the lanyard round his neck. However soundly he sleeps, if any one comes within ten yards of him, tread he never so softly, Baden-Powell wakes up without fail, and with a brain cleared for action. One of the sayings of Baden-Powell which I most like is that which most reveals this side of his character. "A smile and a stick," says he, "will carry you through any difficulty in the world." And he lives in accordance with this principle; and it is typical of the man. Over the world he goes on his solitary expeditions, hunting animals, hunting men, making notes of what foreign armies are doing, what are the chief thoughts occupying the minds of distant and dangerous tribesmen, and he never goes about it blusteringly or with the Byronic mystery of the stage detective. He trusts to his sense of humour--to his smile--first; after that, and only when there is no hope for it, do those hard jaws of his lock with a snap, the eyes light up with resistless determination, and _whir-r-r_ goes the stick, and--well, it requires a tough head to bear what follows. [Illustration: The Family on Board the _Pearl_]