heat and
irritation they had spent upon it.

These very qualities of tact and polish, combined with dignity and
agreeable manners, made Mr. Burlingame popular with the courtly
Chinese officials, and when he was about to return to his own country
some of the Wai-Wu-Pu (Foreign Office) Ministers asked him to speak a
good word for China in the United States. "Was not that an excellent
idea?" they asked the I.G. next day. He agreed, and out of this
trivial incident grew the Burlingame Mission to all the courts of
Europe. Alas! the idea was visionary rather than practical, and doomed
to disappointment--a disappointment which, luckily, Mr. Burlingame
himself never felt keenly, since he died at St. Petersburg while his
tour was still uncompleted.

At the same time that he was concerned with the Mission, the I.G.
was "setting his house in order" with very practical measures. New
Regulations for Pilotage, Rules for the Joint Investigation (Chinese
and Consular) of Disputed Customs Cases, Rules for Coolie Emigration,
each in turn claimed his attention, and it was he also who arranged
with the Chinese that one-tenth of the tonnage dues--afterwards raised
to seven-tenths--should be devoted to port improvements and lighting
the coasts. Until he took the matter in hand, vessels had been obliged
to grope around the difficult China coast in total darkness; to-day,
thanks to his foresight, lighthouses are dotted from Newchang in the
north to Hainan in the south, and a little fleet of three Revenue
cruisers serves them.

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 pres