an excuse for future misunderstandings in the person of an officious,
inefficient interpreter whom Robert Hart himself described as a
"'Talkee talkee, me-no-savey,' the sort of person whose attempt at
Mandarin [official Chinese] is even viler than his English."

There then remained nothing more to do in Soochow, and Hart and Gordon
started back together to Quinsan, though not before they had visited
the historic Soochow stockades together, and Gordon, taking his friend
over every disputed foot of ground, had vividly described the bloody
fighting there--the victory so pleasant to remember, the tragedy so
difficult to forget.

I doubt if anything he ever did in China gave Robert Hart greater
pleasure than this reconciliation, or if there was any other single
episode in his career in which he took more pride; though he spoke of
it so seldom and so modestly that scarcely any one--certainly not
the public--knew of what he had done. It cost him a few friends among
minor officials who thought that negotiations should have passed
through their hands rather than his. But his old friend Sir Frederick
Bruce, to whom he wrote a report of the whole affair (afterwards
included in the Blue Book for 1864), took genuine pleasure in his
success, while the Chinese gratitude was unbounded; they realized very
clearly what the extremity had been and the difficulty from which they
had been rescued.

Three months after the reconciliation (April 28th) Robert Hart
went once again to see Gordon and to be present at the taking of
Chang-Chow-Fu. This was one of those typical water cities of Central
China, walled in of course and with a canal--the Grand Canal in this
case--doing duty for a moat. Gordon's headquarters were in boats,