Another of his amusements at this time was sketching.  He got into the habit of holding his pencil or paint-brush in the left hand, and his watchful mother was troubled in her mind as to the wisdom of allowing a possible Botticelli to play pranks with his art.  One day Ruskin called when this doubt was in her mind, and to him the question was propounded.  Without a moment’s reflection he counselled the mother to let the boy draw in whatsoever manner he listed, and together they went to find the young artist at his work.  In the play-room they discovered one brother reading hard at astronomy, and Ste with a penny box of water-colours painting for dear life—­with his left hand.

“Now I’ll show you how to paint a picture,” said Ruskin, and with a piece of paper on the top of his hat and B.-P.’s penny box of paints at his side he set to work, taking a little china vase for a model.  Both the vase and the picture are now in the drawing-room of Mrs. Baden-Powell’s London house.  The result of Ruskin’s advice was that B.-P. continued to draw with his left hand, and now in making sketches he finds no difficulty in drawing with his left hand and shading in at the same time with his right.

There is an incident of his childhood which I must not forget to record.  At a dinner-party at the Baden-Powells’, when Ste was not yet three years old, the guests being all learned and distinguished men, such as Buckle and Whewell, Thackeray was handing Mrs. Baden-Powell into dinner when he noticed that one of the little children was following behind.  This was the future scout of the British Army, and the young gentleman, according to his wont, was just scrambling into a chair when Thackeray, fumbling in his pocket, produced a new shilling, and said in his caressing voice, “There, little one, you shall have this shilling if you are good and run away.”  Ste quietly looked up at his mother, and not until she told him that he might go up to the nursery did he shift his ground.  But he carried that shilling with him, and now it is one of his most treasured possessions.

While he was doing lessons at home Baden-Powell gave evidence of his bent.  He was fond of geography, and few things pleased him more than the order to draw a map.  His maps, by the way, were always drawn with his left hand, and were astonishingly neat and accurate.  Then in his spare hours, with scissors and paper, he would cut out striking resemblances of the most noted animals in the Zoo, and these—­elephants and tigers, monkeys and bears—­were “hung” by his admiring brothers with due honour on a large looking-glass in the schoolroom, there to amuse the juvenile friends of the family.  He had the knack, too, of closely imitating the various sounds made by animals and birds, and one of his infant jokes was to steal behind a person’s chair and suddenly break forth “with conspuent doodle-doo.”  And, again, when he was a little older, living at Rosenheim, I.W., there was surely the future defender of Mafeking