athletic for the standard, I allowed a
feather for all who were obviously in the
highest class, thus: All who could walk
four miles in an hour, or run 100 yards
in eleven seconds, were entitled to the
decoration. The only cheap one was for
swimming. All who could swim 100
yards, no matter how slowly, got the
swimming feather. This for athletes. In
a second department, called Camper
Craft, I allowed honors to all who could
light a camp-fire with rubbing-sticks, could
measure the width of a river without
crossing it, etc. The third department
was nature study, and honors were allowed
to all who could name correctly twenty-
five trees, fifty flowers, fifty birds, etc.

I had already invented a game called
Deer-Hunting, in which a dummy was
pursued by its tracks of paper (or corn)
or, later, with a steel tracking-iron on the
turf, and shot with arrows; a Hostile Spy
Hunt, a Bear Hunt, a Rabbit Hunt, a Man
Hunt, Spearing the Big Beaver, Trials of
Quicksight and Farsight, were all pre-
pared and lying in wait with their insidi-
ous appeal to the primitive nature of these
very primitive young persons. There
was sanity in every part of the scheme;
because it had picturesqueness; it made
the boys govern themselves, and it gave
them definite things to do; but, above all,
it never failed to play on the master
power of the savage-the love of glory
that was always kept in mind.

It was
used as the lure, the lash, and the motive
power to get these boys into different
ways of life and thought.

There was no harm done to boats,
teepees, or outfit other than fair wear
and tear during that camping, and before
it was over Moale, instead of having a
gang of bandits to combat the year round,
had now a guard of stanch friends,
ready to fight his battles and look out for.
his interests when he was away.

visiting his distant relative, saying: "Say, Medicine-Man, I killed one of your rabbits last summer with a catapult, and I brung this one to take its place."

It was a turning-point for the Head Chief. He had never before been treated as a person of importance, and he loved the taste of it so well that he tried to live so that it might continue.

Other workers became interested, and the scheme has spread since then, till now there are several thousand bands—a hundred thousand boys. I tried to call them Woodcraft Indians, but the boys have voted me down, and each band, though it has a local name of Indian origin, considers itself a branch of the Nation of Seton Indians.

I had always objected to their being called Seton Indians. It seemed like pushing myself forward unduly, but the public did not take at all to the name "Woodcraft Indians." Next I discovered that the word Indian was a serious handicap. Many people considered the Indian a loathsome tramp and as far as possible from being a safe ideal for boys. Thus I was looking about for another possible name, when an unexpected suggestion was made.

In 1904 I took the movement to England, giving public and private addresses on Woodcraft and Scouting for boys, and distributed the little Red Book, as the Birch-Bark Roll was then called. In 1906 I got the help of General Baden-Powell, then the Chief Scout of the British Army. He worked with me for two years, and in 1908 gave the movement a great popular boom by changing the name from Woodcraft Indians to Boy Scouts, and still further enlarging the field by adding several purely civic departments, including a savings bank law for the encouragement of thrift.

Divested of the incubus of unacceptable names, and pushed by a man of worldwide fame as a scout and a war hero, the movement has spread far and wide. We have adopted, the name of Boy Scouts in America, and have now an organization that is expected to become a National movement in the widening service for the development of manly character in the rising generation.

Ο

By Jacob A. Riis

Illustrated by Alden Pierson and Katharine Gassaway

N the map of Europe the mainland of Denmark looks like a beckoning finger pointing due north and ending in a narrow sand-reef, upon which the waves of the North Sea and of the Kattegat break with unceasing clamor and strife. The heart of the peninsula, quite one-fourth of its area, was fifty years ago a desert, a barren, melancholy waste where the only sign of life encountered by the hunter gunning for heath fowl and plover was a rare shepherd tending a few lonesome sheep and knitting mechanically on his endless stocking. The two, the lean sheep and the long stocking, together comprised the only industries which the heath afforded and was thought capable of sustaining. A great change has taken place within the span of a single life, and it is all due to the clear sight and patient devotion of one strong man. The story of that unique achievement reads like the tale of the Sleeping Beauty who was roused from her

hundred years' sleep
by the kiss of her
lover prince. The prince
who awoke the slum-
bering heath was a
captain of engineers,
Enrico Dalgas by

name.

Not altogether fanciful is the conceit. Barren, black, and desolate, the great moor gripped the imagination as no smiling land

does yet

scape of field and forest could
where enough of it remains.
Far as
eye reaches the dun heather covers hill
and plain with its somber pall. Like
gloomy sentinels, furry cattail nod in the
bog where the blue gentian peeps timidly
into murky pools; the only human habi-
tation in sight some heath boer's ling-
thatched hut flanked by rows of peat-stacks
in vain endeavor to stay the sweep of the
pitiless west wind. On the barrows
where the vikings sleep their long sleep,
the plover pipes its melancholy lay; be-
tween steep banks a furtive brook steals
swiftly by as if anxious to escape from the
universal blight. Over it all broods the
silence of the desert, drowsy with the hum
of many bees winging their swift way to
the secret feeding-places they know of,
where mayflower and anemone hide under
the heather, witness that forests grew here
in the long ago. In midsummer, when
the purple is on the broom, a strange pag-
eant moves on the dim horizon, a shifting
mirage of sea and
shore, forest, lake, and
islands lying high,
with ships and castles
and spires of distant
churches the witch-
ery of the heath that
speaks in the tales and
superstitions of its sim-
ple people. High in
the blue sears the lark,
singing its song of home
and hope to its nesting
mate. This was the

1

OF FIFTY YEARS AGO

(in 1892) they dug there, and found the bones of a man with skull split
in two. The stump behind which the wretched Svend hid was probably
the last representative of great forests that grew where now is sterile
moor. In the bogs trunks of oak and fir are found lying as they fell
centuries ago. The local names preserve the tradition, with here and
there patches of scrub oak that hug the ground close to escape the
blast from the North Sea. There is one such thicket near the hamlet
of Taulund-the name itself tells of long-forgotten groves and the
story runs among the people yet that once squirrels jumped from
tree to tree without touching ground all the way from Taulund to
Gjellerup Church, a stretch of more than five miles to which the wild
things of the woods have long been strangers. In the shelter of the
old forests men dwelt through ages and made the land yield them a
living. Some cairns that have been explored span over more than a
thousand years.
They were built in the stone age, and served