For twenty years after we had wars in many places--in South and West Africa, in Egypt, Abyssinia, and Afghanistan. In some we gained credit and in some disgrace, but during all that twenty years the leaden eye of officialdom never seems to have fallen upon Gordon. The Chinamen were quicker sighted. He was the first and I believe the only “foreign devil” who was endowed with the Yellow Jacket and made one of the bodyguard of the Son of Heaven. If he had chosen he might have made an enormous fortune and risen to any dignity short of the throne that the Flowery Land had to offer, but as a matter of fact he left China poorer than he went into it, bringing away with him only that big gold medal which he afterwards gave anonymously to charity. And all this time he was, as one of his biographers and a fellow soldier has truly said, “not only without honour in his own country, but was regarded by many of the mandarins and ruling classes of his fellow countymen as a madman.” The use of the word “mandarin” there will be understood if we remember that his brother mandarins of China held him in the highest honour. He came back to England in 1865, and was given the command of the Royal Engineers at Gravesend, and there for six years he did the routine work of a soldier, and in his spare time won a reputation for missionary work of the unofficial and unassuming sort which will live as long as his fame as a soldier and leader of men. Here in the interval between his two careers we may take a glance at the physical man as he was just about now. This is how his comrade Sir William Butler describes him: “In figure Gordon, at forty years of age, stood somewhat under middle height, slight but strong, active, and muscular. A profusion of thick, brown hair clustered above a broad, open forehead. His features were regular, his mouth firm, and his expression when silent had a certain undertone of sadness which instantly vanished when he spoke. “But it was the clear, grey-blue eyes, and the low, soft, and very distinct voice that left the most lasting impression on the memory of the man who had seen and spoken with Charles Gordon, and an eye that seemed to have looked at great distances and seen the load of life carried on men’s shoulders, and a voice that, like the clear chime of some Flemish belfry, had in it fresh music to welcome the newest hour, even though it had rung out the note of many a vanished day.” Such was, then, the outer aspect of the man who at length went to Egypt at the invitation of Nubar Pasha and the Khedive Ismael, to begin that work which in the end cost one of the most valuable of British lives, and made the delta and valley of the Nile what they are to-day in everything but name--a British province.