Three important things occurred in Robert Hart’s life between the years 1870 and 1879.  In 1873 his only son was born; 1875 was marked by the beginning of the famous Margary affair, and in 1878 he went as President of the Chinese Commission to the Paris Exhibition.

A propos of the birth of his son, there was a very strange—­almost what a Highlander would call an “uncanny”—­sequence of dates in the I.G.’s own life.  The year that he himself was born, the 20th of February—­his birthday—­fell on the 23rd day of the Chinese First Moon.  Once more it fell on the 23rd of the First Moon in 1854, the year he came to China, and not again until 1873, when his son first opened his eyes on this best of all possible worlds.  A coincidence if you like, but still a very remarkable one all the same.

In 1875 the famous Margary affair, destined to become so complicated later on, first appeared upon the stage of politics in the simplest possible form.  There was one hero and one villain, with a crowd of shadowy accomplices looking over his shoulder.  To this day it is not certain how many there actually were.  We can distinctly follow the unfortunate hero—­his name was Margary, his occupation Interpreter at a Consulate—­on his journey across Yunnan to Burmah as far as Tengyueh.  We know he was cruelly done to death there, but we cannot sift out truth from falsehood in the rumours that he met his death with the connivance—­and perhaps even under the orders of—­the provincial authorities.

The simple fact of a white man’s murder was, of course, bad enough; but when that white man was an official and on a mission, it was a hundred times worse.  Negotiations between the British Legation and the Chinese began immediately.  On the one side heavy compensation was demanded, on the other it was argued over and delayed.  Neither party would move a step forward, and presently the Yunnan outrage got hopelessly mixed with every other disputed question of the day; new demands sprang up beside old ones; both parties, as Michie says, found themselves “entangled in a perfect cat’s-cradle of negotiations,” and the Chinese in the privacy of their yamens were beginning to ask themselves gloomily, “Will the English fight unless we make full reparation?”

Would they?  There was the rub.  But now, the crisis being safely passed, I may tell that they would—­that they very nearly did—­and that the thing that prevented them was nothing more nor less than the moving of the Customs pew in the British Legation Chapel from the front of the church to the back.  So do great events sometimes hang upon trifles.

After the arbitrary moving of his accustomed seat, the I.G. remained away from the Sunday services for more than a year.  Then, just when the political atmosphere was most electric, Bishop Russell, an old friend of Ningpo days and a charming and genial Irishman, came to Peking on a visit.  He was to preach in the Legation Chapel the next Sunday, and the I.G. could not resist the temptation of going to hear his old acquaintance.