may still be seen.

* * * * *

Till the large sum fixed for the expenses of the war was paid General
Staveley was left with three thousand men in command at Tientsin, and
Gordon remained with him. Tientsin is a dreary place in a salt plain,
and the climate is very cold, as it is throughout North China. But
Gordon minded cold far less than heat and mosquitoes, and besides his
days were full from morning till night, building huts for the soldiers
and stables for the horses, and in managing a fund which he had
collected to help some Chinese in the neighbourhood who had been ruined
by the war. Though very careless of his own money, and ready to give it
away without inquiry to any beggar who asked for it, he was most
particular about other people's, and the attention which he paid to
small things enabled him to spend the fund in the manner that would best
aid the poor creatures who had lost everything. Now and then he gave
himself a day's holiday, and explored the country, as he was fond of
doing; and once he rode out to the Great Wall, twenty-two feet high and
sixteen wide, which runs along the north-west of China, over mountains
and across plains, for fifteen hundred miles, and was built two thousand
years ago by an emperor to keep out the invading hosts of the Tartars.
At certain distances strong forts were placed, and these were garrisoned
by Chinese soldiers. As he passed through the more remote villages the
inhabitants would come out of their houses and stare. A white man! They
had heard that there were such, though they had never really believed
it. Well, he was a strange creature truly, with his hair cropped close
and pink in his cheeks, and they did not much admire him!

Nearer Pekin he met long strings, or caravans, of camels laden with tea,
making their way to Russia. Everywhere in the neighbourhood of the
mountains it was frightfully cold, and raw eggs were frozen so hard that
no one could eat them; but Gordon could do with as little food as any
man, and did not suffer from the climate. He came back strengthened and
interested, and it was as well he had the short rest to brace him, for
now there lay before him a very difficult task.

* * * * *

For quite thirty years great discontent with government had been felt by
the peasants and lower classes in some of the central provinces of the
empire, and a long while before the war with England broke out