A WORD OF INTRODUCTION

Seventy-three years ago a little Irish boy lay in his aunt’s lap looking out on a strange and mysterious world that his solemn eyes had explored for scarcely ten short days, while she, to whom the commonplaces of everyday surroundings had lost their first absorbing interest, was busily engaged in braiding a watch-chain from her splendid, Titian-red hair.  These chains were the fashion of the hour, and the old family doctor, friend as well as physician, paused after a visit to the boy’s mother, to joke her about it:  “You’re making a keepsake for your sweetheart, I see.”

“No, indeed,” she answered gaily with a toss of her bonny head, “I’m making a wedding present for this new nephew of mine when he marries your daughter.”

It was a long-shot prophecy.  The doctor was even then a man past his first youth; the neighbours looked upon him as a confirmed bachelor; he seemed as unlikely ever to possess a daughter as a diamond mine.  Yet, all these improbabilities notwithstanding, he had taken to himself the luxury of a wife within a very few years, and soon children were climbing on his knees.  I cannot say whether this red-haired young woman had the gift of second sight or whether, by some subtle power of suggestion, she willed the doctor to carry out her prophecy.  I only know that the prophecy was startlingly fulfilled, for among his children was one little girl who, when she grew to womanhood, did marry the nephew and did get the watch-chain as a wedding gift.

The doctor’s daughter was an aunt of mine, and her romantic marriage, by tying our two families together, gave me some slight claim on her husband’s affection.  Propinquity afterwards ripened what opportunity had begun; we lived long side by side in a far-away corner of the world, and from the formal relationship of uncle and niece soon slipped into that still better and warmer companionship of friend and friend.

For me the friendship has ever been, is, and always will be, a thing to take pride in, a thing to treasure.  Nor will you wonder when I confess that he of whom I speak is none other than the great Sir Robert Hart, the man whose life has been as useful as varied, as romantic as successful.

The story of it can be but imperfectly written now.  There are many shoals in the form of diplomatic indiscretions to steer clear of; there is much weighing and sifting of political motives for serious historians to do, but the time has not come for that.  Much of the romance of his long career in China lies over and above such things, and of the romantic and personal side I here set down what I have gathered from one and from another—­chiefly from those who have had the opportunity to collect their information at first hand, who either knew him sooner than I or were themselves concerned in the events described—­in the hope that some readers may sufficiently enjoy the romance of a great career to forgive any imperfections in the telling for the sake of the story itself.