But this book is not intended to be a "biography" of Baden-Powell, and I shall beg leave to relate no chronological record of his military career.

We are telling his story as a story, hoping to interest every English schoolboy who has arrived at years of discretion, hoping to make them keen on sport, keen on exercise, keen on open-air life, and hoping, in addition, to be of real practical use to those whose eyes are now set hungrily on Sandhurst.
In a later chapter it will be seen how Baden-Powell interested himself in his men's welfare, and how he encouraged them to become real soldiers--learned in things other than mere boot-cleaning and button-polishing.

Here we behold him as the gay and dashing Hussar, a bold sportsman, a keen soldier, and one of the most popular men in India.
His popularity, it is only fair to say, was earned very largely by that gift for acting which had won him fame as a schoolboy.

Whispers that he was going to act in the _Area Belle_, or one of Gilbert and Sullivan's operas, travelled with amazing rapidity from station to station in India, and every performance in which he took part was attended by all the Europeans for miles round.

Indeed his fame as an actor travelled so far afield that the manager of a London theatre wrote to him in India offering our astonished hero a position in his company at a salary of ten pounds a week! There is never an occasion when B.-P.