I expect most Scouts have found, like I have done, that wherever you go in the streets, or in a strange town, or far out in the country, you come across a boy wearing a buttonhole badge. As you get nearer you see that it is the well-known three-pointed badge of the Scouts.
You make the salute sign, shake hands with left hands, and there you are, in company with a friend and brother, who a minute before was a total stranger to you.
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CHILIAN SCOUTS.
Our World-roving Commissioner—for we have one who travels about to all countries now—was once in Chile, which, as you know, is a long, narrow strip of country in South America, three thousand miles long, and not one hundred miles wide, packed in between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean.
The Boy Scouts of Chile are among the best in the world. They have done a lot of tramping-camps and other expeditions. Finally, their Government arranged a cruise for them on board a man-of-war, and they lived for over a week on the ship, about two hundred of them, learning swimming, boating, navigation, engine-room work; in fact, all the duties of Sea Scouts.
These boys all had to pay their messing and other expenses, so it was only the richer ones that were able to go; but since then they have arranged to go another cruise, and each of the richer ones is going to take a poorer Scout with him as his guest, and will pay his expenses for him.
That's what I like to see, and it tells me more than any other reports that the Chilian Scouts have got the right spirit in them.
A lad from Brixham, in Devonshire, went out to take up some work in Chile. He was a Boy Scout, and continued while away to wear his buttonhole badge. One day, when he was out in the back parts of that out-of-the-way country, a Chilian boy came up to him, gave the Scout salute, and pointing to his badge, said:
"You Boy Scout? Me Scout too!" and he took him home to tea, and looked after him, and thus they became good friends.