Alas! this home life, delightful though it was, could not last very long.  On August 22nd, 1866, he married that daughter of old Dr. Bredon of Portadown that his aunt had prophesied he would when, at the age of ten days, he lay upon her lap.  The honeymoon was spent at the romantic lakes of Killarney, and very soon afterwards the young couple were on their way out to China again.

The house in Peking had been somewhat rearranged and remodelled while the I.G. was in Europe, in anticipation of his wife’s coming.  Without altering the picturesqueness of the original Chinese design, it had been adapted to Western ideas of comfort.  The pretty pavilions with their upturned roofs remained; the ornamental rockwork of the courtyards, the doors shaped like gourds or leaves or full moons, were left untouched.  So were the odd-shaped windows, real Jack Frost designs; but instead of paper, glass was fitted into the quaint panes and the stone floors, characteristic of Chinese rooms, covered with wood—­a very necessary alteration in a town which, although in the same latitude as Naples, Madrid and Constantinople, has a winter as severe as New York.

Fortunately neither he nor his bride had a very keen taste for society, as in those days Peking could not boast of any.  The Diplomatic Corps was small; no concession-hunters or would-be builders of battleships enlivened the capital with their intrigues, and the monotony of life was broken only by an occasional visitor.

Rarely, very rarely, there was a dinner party—­a formal affair, to which the I.G.’s wife went in state and, as became her rank, in a big green box of a sedan chair with four bearers.  Indeed this was the only possible means of going about comfortably at night in a city of unexpected ditches, ruts like sword-gashes, and lighted only by twinkling lanterns of belated roysterers.

The I.G. was therefore somewhat disconcerted when his chair coolies, having been six months in his service, came to say they could remain no longer.  “It is not that we are discontented with our wages,” the head man explained, “or that you are not a kind master, or that the Taitai [the lady of the house] is an inconsiderate mistress.”

“Then you have too much work to do?”

“No, that’s the trouble,” the man replied, “we have not enough.  Our shoulders are getting soft and our leg muscles are getting flabby.  Now if the Taitai would only go out for twenty miles every day instead of for two miles every ten days as she does now, we would be delighted to remain in your service.”  Was ever stranger complaint made by servant to master?

Whenever work permitted Robert Hart and his wife rode out into the country on their stocky native ponies, sometimes to one and sometimes to another of the picturesque temples, pagodas and monasteries which then abounded in the hills near by.  The favourite picnicking place of the little community—­almost the only Imperial property open in those days—­was the ruined palace of Yuen Ming Yuen destroyed by the Allies in 1860.  It must have been a most charming spot, at all events in the autumn months, when the persimmon-trees, heavy with balls of golden, fruit, overhung its grey walls.