ent, Dean Butcher preached
from a text in the Psalms, "If I go up to the heights, Thy Presence is
beside me, and if I go into the utmost depths. It is there," etc. He
had subdivided the sermon into headings--preached about God in heaven
and God upon earth, when he suddenly began to cough a little. "The
preacher's voice fails him," he said--cough, cough--"fails him, my
brethren"--more coughs--"fails him"--still more gentle coughs--"and so
we must leave God in hell till next Sunday."

Some years afterwards, when the I.G. was in Shanghai again, he went to
a luncheon at which Dean Butcher was present. Every one was asked
to tell a story, and when Robert Hart's turn came, he told one of
a certain clergyman of his acquaintance--the name he mercifully
withheld--who had "left God in hell till next Sunday." The face of
Dean Butcher during the telling was a study in sunset colours, but no
one except himself and the I.G. remembered the particular preacher who
had been so indiscreet.

Before he left Shanghai Robert Hart received the first of his long
series of honours. It came with delightful unexpectedness, with no
warning of its arrival; simply, one day as he was going to see his
lawyer, Mr. (afterwards Sir Nicholas) Hannen, a passing postman handed
him a little brown-paper parcel with Swedish stamps on it. As he
had neither acquaintance nor official correspondence with Sweden or
Norway, he was completely puzzled as to what it might contain. Greatly
to his surprise, on opening it he found an order, the "Wasa" of Sweden
and Norway, the very first foreign recognition of his international
work in China. Coming as it did just at that moment, it was singularly
opportune and acceptable, and ever afterwards I know it held a
peculiar place in his affections, even when he received a shower of
Grand Crosses from every civilized country in the world.

CHAPTER VI

BIRTH OF A SON--THE MARGARY AFFAIR AND THE CHEFOO CONVENTION--A SECOND
VISIT TO EUROPE--THE PARIS EXHIBITION OF 1878

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,