Of course the first bush passed by the battery fired the carbine, and Baden-Powell remarks of the incident, "Many a man has nearly been shot by an ass, but I claim to have been nearly shot by a mule." It is Baden-Powell's habit to keep in perfect readiness at his London house an entire kit for service abroad.

The most methodical of men, he has made a study of this important branch of a wanderer's service, and when he sets out on his journeys he carries with him everything that is essential both for himself and his horse, and packed in such a way as would be the despair of the deftest valet.

When the War Office asks him how long he will be before starting on a commission abroad, B.-P.

answers, "I am ready now." Everything is there in a room in his mother's house, and Baden-Powell is never so happy as when that khaki kit leaves its resting-place and is packed away in a ship's cabin.

And what journeys he has been on Queen's service! Before he was twenty-three he had travelled over the greater part of Afghanistan, and then after seeing most of India, he was in South Africa at twenty-seven, and did there a wonderful reconnaissance, unaccompanied, of six hundred miles of the Natal Frontier in twenty days.