The first order transmitted by Prince Kung to the new Inspector-General—­or the I.G., as he was always familiarly called—­was that he should live at Shanghai.  This gave him the opportunity of meeting and working with the famous “Chinese Gordon,” to whom the suppression of the Taiping Rebellion was so largely due.  For the history of that rebellion—­how one soldier of fortune after the other attempted to suppress it; how the picturesque American Burgevine, on changing masters and seeking to better his fortune with the rebels, was succeeded by the prosaic failure Holland; how at last, on General Staveley’s recommendation, Charles Gordon was lent with several other young officers to the Imperialist cause—­the reader must go (and will thank me for sending him) to some of the many historians who have immortalized the struggle.

Nothing remains to be told about that terrible war—­except the part that Robert Hart accidentally played in it.

His first meeting with Gordon was planned for October 1863, when Major-General Brown, commanding the troops at Hongkong, came up to Shanghai for the express purpose of seeing the brilliant young commander of what was already known as “The Ever-Victorious Army.”  Gordon sent the Firefly to take the General and the Inspector-General up the Soochow Creek to Quinsan, where he then was, and on a certain Sunday morning they intended to have started.  Fortunately, as it afterwards turned out, Fate interfered at this point.

The English mail arrived suddenly on Saturday night with important despatches; the General sent his A.D.C. to say that he could not possibly leave until they were answered; and so, reluctantly, the visit was postponed—­as the two men thought, for a few days, but in reality for much longer.  Next morning the A.D.C. hurried round again almost before Hart was out of bed, and this time with the most sensational news—­the Firefly had been boarded as she lay at her moorings by foreign friends of the rebels, carried up stream, and burnt.  Both her European engineers had mysteriously disappeared.

The whole affair, of course, was a plot as deep laid as diabolical, hatched by the rebels for the purpose of getting rid of General Brown, who they feared was about to reinforce Gordon.  But for the timely arrival of those pressing despatches it would have succeeded, and he and the I.G. would have been trapped and quietly murdered.

Not till the spring of 1864 did the delayed meeting finally take place.  There had been a serious difference of opinion between Gordon and Li Hung Chang—­a difference which arose over the taking of Soochow.  When the city, thanks to Gordon’s co-operation, was captured, certain of the Taiping princes agreed to surrender.  General Ching went to interview them outside one of the city gates, taking Gordon with him.  His idea was that if the great General Gordon showed the rebels that he had actually been concerned in the successful operations against them, they would be the more likely to consider further resistance hopeless.  Gordon, on the other hand, thought his presence would be taken by them to mean surety for their safety.  It was not an unnatural misunderstanding, seeing that Gordon spoke no Chinese, that neither the rebels nor General Ching understood English, and that there was no interpreter present.