"A hero is a hero," said Mr. Norton, before Skinny had time to finish, "and a boy is a boy, I guess, no matter in what country he happens to live. I have heard all about the Band, and I know that if you had been in Mafeking that time you would have been among the first to volunteer for scout service, bullets or no bullets, and Washington or no Washington."
"Hurrah!" yelled Bill, forgetting where he was. "That's the stuff. Injun or no Injun, too. I knew an English boy once, and he was all right. Say, you ought to have seen him in a scrap."
Mr. Norton laughed and went on with his story.
"A few years later Gen. Robert Baden-Powell, who had been colonel in command of the English forces at Mafeking, got to thinking about those boys in South Africa and how manly it made them to help in the scouting. He liked boys and he made up his mind that if scouting had been good for those boys it would be good for any boys. Not the fighting part, I mean, but the outdoor life, learning to take care of themselves in the wilderness, make camps, build fires, find their way through the forest, follow a trail, and such things. So he called a meeting of a lot of boys and talked to them and showed them how to do it. They played at being Indians mostly."
"They don't have Injuns in England," said Bill, shaking his head, "unless it's in a Wild West show, and that doesn't count."
"You are stopping the story, Bill," Skinny told him. "What's the difference?"
"Well, they don't," grumbled Bill.
"Anyhow," Mr. Norton went on, "the boys enjoyed the play, and the idea spread like wildfire, until now there are Boy Scouts all over the world. In America here Ernest Thompson Seton had much the same idea. He was teaching the boys woodcraft, camp life, and such things by organizing the Seton Indians that you may have heard about. Then he went to England, where he and General Baden-Powell put their heads together and worked out the Boy Scout idea. In this country the boys are known as 'the Boy Scouts of America,' but nearly every civilized nation has its Boy Scouts under some name or other, and the movement is very popular among the boys.
"I invited you up here to-night to get acquainted with the Band. Skinny, I mean Gabriel, tells me that you are all live wires. I want to know if you will join the Scouts. You can have a patrol of your own, select your own patrol leader and your own patrol animal."
"What's a patrol animal?" we asked.