gummy-fingered

Updated: June 6, 2025

The fifties which gave him birth seem now to belong to a remote and benighted era; and the blindest of his unknown adorers, if she has bought a hatless photograph, cannot deny that Time's effacing fingers have something roughly swept the brow where she could wish his hair still lingered, and yet at forty-three, Baden-Powell, Colonel of Dragoons, goes wandering into bush and prairie, striding by stream and striking up mountain, with all the eagerness, all the keenness, all the abandonment of the gummy-fingered boy seeking butterflies and birds' eggs.

Harold Begbie - The Story of Baden-Powell: 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps'