A lawsuit called him to Shanghai, when these matters were off his hands, and kept him there for some weeks.  He had time to enter into the social life of the place, meet all the people worth meeting, and, what he enjoyed most of all, hear the sermons of a certain Dean Butcher, famous for his wit.  The first Sunday the I.G. “sat under” him, the Dean dragged out his discourse so interminably—­and quite contrary to his usual custom—­that Robert Hart actually took out his watch.  Just as he quietly got it back to his pocket again and noticed that he had listened for fifty minutes, the preacher looked up from his manuscript and made Hart start guiltily as he said, “You ask, is the sermon done.  No, my brothers, it is not done.  It is read.  Be ye doers of the Word, not hearers only.”  This bit of effect at the end, so cleverly led up to, accounted for the unnaturally long discourse.

Another time, when Robert Hart was present, Dean Butcher preached from a text in the Psalms, “If I go up to the heights, Thy Presence is beside me, and if I go into the utmost depths.  It is there,” etc.  He had subdivided the sermon into headings—­preached about God in heaven and God upon earth, when he suddenly began to cough a little.  “The preacher’s voice fails him,” he said—­cough, cough—­“fails him, my brethren”—­more coughs—­“fails him”—­still more gentle coughs—­“and so we must leave God in hell till next Sunday.”

Some years afterwards, when the I.G. was in Shanghai again, he went to a luncheon at which Dean Butcher was present.  Every one was asked to tell a story, and when Robert Hart’s turn came, he told one of a certain clergyman of his acquaintance—­the name he mercifully withheld—­who had “left God in hell till next Sunday.”  The face of Dean Butcher during the telling was a study in sunset colours, but no one except himself and the I.G. remembered the particular preacher who had been so indiscreet.

Before he left Shanghai Robert Hart received the first of his long series of honours.  It came with delightful unexpectedness, with no warning of its arrival; simply, one day as he was going to see his lawyer, Mr. (afterwards Sir Nicholas) Hannen, a passing postman handed him a little brown-paper parcel with Swedish stamps on it.  As he had neither acquaintance nor official correspondence with Sweden or Norway, he was completely puzzled as to what it might contain.  Greatly to his surprise, on opening it he found an order, the “Wasa” of Sweden and Norway, the very first foreign recognition of his international work in China.  Coming as it did just at that moment, it was singularly opportune and acceptable, and ever afterwards I know it held a peculiar place in his affections, even when he received a shower of Grand Crosses from every civilized country in the world.

CHAPTER VI

BIRTH OF A SON—­THE MARGARY AFFAIR AND THE CHEFOO CONVENTION—­A SECOND VISIT TO EUROPE—­THE PARIS EXHIBITION OF 1878