AN INTRODUCTORY FRAGMENT ON NO ACCOUNT TOBE SKIPPEDYou will be the first to grant me, honoured sir, that after earnestness of pur-pose, that is to say "keenness," there is no quality of the mind so essentialto the even-balance as humour. The schoolmaster without this humanisingvirtue never yet won your love and admiration, and to miss your affectionand loyalty is to lose one of life's chiefest delights. You are as quick to detectthe humbug who hides his mediocrity behind an affectation of dignity aswas dear old Yorick, of whom you will read when you have got to know thesweetness of Catullus. This Yorick it was who declared that the Frenchman'sepigram describing gravity as "a mysterious carriage of the body to cover thedefects of the mind," deserved "to be wrote in letters of gold"; and I make nodoubt that had there been a greater recognition of the extreme value and im-portance of humour in the early ages of the world, our history books wouldrecord fewer blunders on the part of kings, counsellors, and princes, and thegreat churches would not have alienated the sympathy of so many goodlypeople at the most important moment in their existence-the beginning oftheir proselytism.3 HAROLD BEGBIEThis 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 theideal British officer; but if I had blurted this out at the beginning of my storyyou might perhaps have flung the book into an ink-stained corner, thinkingyou were in for a dull lecture. It is the misfortune of goodness to be gener-ally 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 as-suring 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.He is a hero in the best sense of the word, living cleanly, despising viciousnessequally with effeminacy, and striving after the development of his talents, just as a wise painter labours at the perfecting of his picture. Permit me hereto quote the words of a sagacious Florentine gentleman named Guicciardini: "Men," says he, "are all by nature more inclined to do good than ill; nor isthere anybody who, where he is not by some strong consideration pulled theother way, would not more willingly do good than ill."Goodness, then, is a part of our being; therefore when you are behavingyourself like a true man, do not flatter yourself that you are doing any su-perhuman feat. And do not, as some do, have a sort of stupid contemptfor people who respect truth, honesty, and purity, people who work hard atschool, never insult their masters, and try to get on in the world without soil-ing their fingers and draggling their skirts in the mire. But see you cultivatehumour as you go along. Without that there is danger in the other.It is useful to reflect that no man without the moral idea ever wrought ourcountry lasting service or won himself a place in the hearts of mankind. Onthe other hand, most of the men whose names are associated in your