was a slight rattle of trinkets, and a swish of the tall yellow grass, followed by the apparition of a naked Matabele warrior standing glistening among the rocks of the streamlet, within thirty yards of me.  His white war ornaments—­the ball of clipped feathers on his brow, and the long white cow’s-tail plume which depended from his arms and knees—­contrasted strongly with his rich brown skin.  His kilt of wild cat-skins and monkeys’ tails swayed round his loins.  His left hand bore his assegais and knobkerrie beneath the great dappled ox-hide shield; and in his right a yellow walking-staff.  He stood for almost a minute perfectly motionless, like a statue cast in bronze, his head turned from me, listening for any suspicious sound.  Then, with a swift and easy movement, he laid his arms and shield noiselessly upon the rocks, and, dropping on all fours beside a pool, he dipped his muzzle down and drank just like an animal.  I could hear the thirsty sucking of his lips from where I lay.  He drank and drank as though he never meant to stop, and when at last his frame could hold no more, he rose with evident reluctance.  He picked his weapons up, and then stood again to listen.  Hearing nothing, he turned and sharply moved away.  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.  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.”