of the mind so essential to the even-balance as humour. The
schoolmaster without this humanising virtue never yet won your love
and admiration, and to miss your affection and loyalty is to lose one
of life's chiefest delights. You are as quick to detect the humbug who
hides his mediocrity behind an affectation of dignity as was dear old
Yorick, of whom you will read when you have got to know the sweetness
of Catullus. This Yorick it was who declared that the Frenchman's
epigram describing gravity as "a mysterious carriage of the body to
cover the defects of the mind," deserved "to be wrote in letters of
gold"; and I make no doubt that had there been a greater recognition
of the extreme value and importance of humour in the early ages of the
world, our history books would record fewer blunders on the part of
kings, counsellors, and princes, and the great churches would not have
alienated the sympathy of so many goodly people at the most important
moment in their existence--the beginning of their proselytism.

This erudite reflection is to prepare you for the introduction of my
hero, Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell. I introduce him to you as
a hero--and as a humourist. To me he appears the ideal English
schoolboy, and the ideal British officer; but if I had blurted this
out at the beginning of my story you might perhaps have flung the book
into an ink-stained corner, thinking you were in for a dull lecture.
It is the misfortune of goodness to be generally treated with
superstitious awe, as though it were a visitant from heaven, instead
of being part and parcel of our own composition. So I begin by
assuring you that if ever there was a light-hearted, jovial creature
it is my hero, and by promising you that he shall not bore you with
moral disquisitions, nor shock your natural and untainted mind with
impossible precepts.