Sir Robert Hart | Page 2

ever to possess a daughter as a diamond mine.
Yet, all these improbabilities notwithstanding, he had taken to himself
the luxury of a wife within a very few years, and soon children were
climbing on his knees. I cannot say whether this red-haired young
woman had the gift of second sight or whether, by some subtle power
of suggestion, she willed the doctor to carry out her prophecy. I only
know that the prophecy was startlingly fulfilled, for among his children
was one little girl who, when she grew to womanhood, did marry the
nephew and did get the watch-chain as a wedding gift.
The doctor's daughter was an aunt of mine, and her romantic marriage,
by tying our two families together, gave me some slight claim on her
husband's affection. Propinquity afterwards ripened what opportunity
had begun; we lived long side by side in a far-away corner of the world,
and from the formal relationship of uncle and niece soon slipped into
that still better and warmer companionship of friend and friend.
For me the friendship has ever been, is, and always will be, a thing to
take pride in, a thing to treasure. Nor will you wonder when I confess
that he of whom I speak is none other than the great Sir Robert Hart,
the man whose life has been as useful as varied, as romantic as
successful.
The story of it can be but imperfectly written now. There are many
shoals in the form of diplomatic indiscretions to steer clear of; there is
much weighing and sifting of political motives for serious historians to
do, but the time has not come for that. Much of the romance of his long
career in China lies over and above such things, and of the romantic
and personal side I here set down what I have gathered from one and
from another--chiefly from those who have had the opportunity to
collect their information at first hand, who either knew him sooner than
I or were themselves concerned in the events described--in the hope
that some readers may sufficiently enjoy the romance of a great career
to forgive any imperfections in the telling for the sake of the story
itself.

CHAPTER I

EARLY YEARS
Robert Hart began his romantic life in simple circumstances. He was
born on the 20th day of February, 1835, in a little white house with
green shutters on Dungannon Street, in the small Irish town of
Portadown, County Armagh, and was the eldest of twelve children. His
mother, a daughter of Mr. John Edgar, of Ballybreagh, must have been
a delightful woman, all tenderness and charity, judging from the way
her children's affections became entwined around her. His father,
Henry Hart, was a man of forceful and picturesque character, of a
somewhat antique strain, and a Wesleyan to the core. The household,
therefore, grew up under the bracing influence of uncompromising
doctrines; it was no unusual thing for one member to ask another at
table, "What have you been doing for God to-day?" and so rigidly was
Sunday observed that, had the family owned any Turners, I am sure
they would have been covered up on Saturday nights, just as they were
in Ruskin's home.
When the young Robert was only twelve months old the Harts moved
to Miltown, on the banks of beautiful Lough Neagh, remaining there
barely a year. Then they moved again--this time to Hillsborough, where
he attended his first school. It came about in this way. One afternoon he
was called into the parlour by his father. Two visitors--not by any
means an everyday occurrence in Miltown--were within. One was a
stoutish man with sandy hair, the other a very long person like a
knitting-needle. The stout man called the boy to him, passed his hand
carefully over the bumps of his head, and then, turning to the father,
said, "From what I gather of this child's talents from my examination of
his cranial cerebration, my brother's system of education is exactly the
one calculated to develop them," The men were two brothers named
Arnold, who proposed to open a little school in Hillsborough and were
tramping the country in search of pupils.
At the impressionable age of six or thereabouts an aunt fired the boy's
imagination with stories of the departed glories of the Hart family. She
used to tell him how their ancestor, Captain van Hardt, came over from
Holland with King William, fought at the Battle of the Boyne and

greatly distinguished himself; how afterwards, in recognition of his
gallant services, the King gave him the township of Kilmoriarty as a
reward; how the gallant captain settled himself down there, kept his
horses, ate well, drank deep, and left the place so burdened with debt
that one of his descendants