Soon after the I.G. had the dangerous pleasure of reading his own obituary notices, and then, very much alive again, he set to work once more.  Not for him was a change of air and scene possible.  As he whimsically remarked to some one who urged him to take a rest after the discomforts and trials of the Siege, “I have had my holiday already.  Eight weeks of doing nothing,—­what more could a man expect?”

The Yamen Secretaries were seeking him out three days after the last shot was fired—­while he still remained in the Legation—­eagerly enquiring what he thought of the possibility of beginning negotiations with the Powers.  How could order be brought out of chaos?

[Illustration:  SIR ROBERT HART AND A GROUP OF CUSTOMS PEOPLE.]

As a famous Chinese, Ku Hung Ming, author of the “Papers from a Viceroy’s Yamen,” afterwards said, “All great men are optimists, and Sir Robert Hart was the greatest optimist we had in 1900.”  His hopefulness encouraged the officials so much that the heads of the Yamen soon sent word they also wished to consult him:  this business, if there was any hope of its success, was too big to be entrusted to deputies.  Accordingly he began a search for new offices, since the Legation was no place to receive such men and his own house had been burned down.

Alas for the mournful desolation that met his eyes when he made a melancholy pilgrimage, as it were, to his old quarters!  Nothing was left of the house but a few charred walls.  Broken tiles lay scattered here and there, and he picked up the head of a pretty little Saxe shepherdess, of all things the most fragile and improbable to survive such a storm.  The rest of his belongings had disappeared utterly—­all the treasures of a lifetime had been burned or looted—­priceless letters from Chinese Gordon and from Gladstone, the wonderful rainbow-silk scrolls for his Chinese patent of nobility, the photographs of all the famous men with whom he had been associated in the past—­everything.

He was glad enough to get two rooms behind Kierulff’s shop for temporary living quarters.  What matter if his hall door was littered with packing-cases, or if his sitting-room windows fronted upon waste ground where a herd of mules scampered?  He soon learned to pick his way among the former; the latter, with characteristic caution, always respected his panes, and anyway it was not the time for finicking over trifles.

For an office he hired a tiny little temple nestling under the walls of the Tartar City.  It was but a small pied-a-terre, yet all he required, for the Customs Archives had been burnt, and the Deputy Inspector General, Sir Robert Bredon, with the Inspectorate Staff, left immediately for Shanghai to begin the difficult task of picking up the threads of Customs work there.