In three swift strides he disappeared within the grass as silently as he had come.

I had been so taken with the spectacle that I felt no desire to shoot at him--especially as he was carrying no gun himself." It is little adventures of this kind, I think, which most impress one with the romance and fascination of a scout's life.
On his solitary wanderings over the earth Baden-Powell has had many narrow escapes of death, but none so near, perhaps, as that of an excited native who, after an action, told B.-P.

with bubbling enthusiasm that a bullet had passed between his ear and his head! Once Baden-Powell came unexpectedly upon a lion prepared to receive him with open jaws, and but for perfectly steady nerves, which enabled him at that critical moment to fire deliberately, he had never brought home another lion's skin to decorate his mother's drawing-room in London.

Another narrow escape occurred during the Matabele campaign, when Baden-Powell was quietly and peacefully marching by the side of a mule battery.

One of the mules had a carbine strapped on to its pack-saddle, and by some extraordinary act of carelessness the weapon had been left loaded, and at full-cock.