There was a silence for a minute or two, and at last one of the sergeants replied, hesitatingly, "Well, no, I shouldn't say they _like_ him"; then in a burst--"why, they worship him!" Let me tell you how Baden-Powell has earned their love.
In the first place, he entered the Army with no mischievous ideas about the manliness and dash of a fast, raking life.

That is a great start, for if the soldier despises one type of officer more than another it is the young sprig who affects to consider soldiering a bore, and comes on parade with the evidence of last night's folly and dissipation in his drawn face and dull eyes.

Baden-Powell was keen about his work from the first, and never posed as a drawling Silenus in gold lace.

In the second place, Baden-Powell, who always possessed a great deal of sound common sense, took an interest in his men, treated them as intelligent beings, and never for once mistook the drunken, devil-may-care Private of fiction for the soldier who goes anywhere and does anything.

It is a literary "dodge" to reach the reader's sympathies by drawing the blackguard in order to find the hero; one good deed in that world of unreality wipes out all the unworthiness of a lifetime, and the reader puts down the tale with a longing to fall on the neck and wring the hand of the very next hiccupping Tommy he encounters.