From 1865 to 1875 Gordon lived at Gravesend, employed in the duty of improving the defenses of the Thames. These were his six years of quiet peace and beneficent happiness. “He lived wholly for others,” writes his friend. “His house was school and hospital and almshouse, in turn; was more like the abode of a missionary than of a commanding officer of engineers. The troubles of all interested him alike. The poor, the sick, the unfortunate, were ever welcome, and never did suppliant knock vainly at his door. He always took great delight in children, but especially in boys employed on the river or the sea. Many he rescued from the gutter, cleansed them and clothed them, and kept them for weeks in his house. For their benefit he established reading-classes, over which he himself presided, reading to and teaching the lads with as much ardor as if he were leading them to victory. He called them his ‘kings,’ and for many of them he got berths on board ships. One day a friend asked him why there were so many pins stuck into the map of the world over his mantlepiece; he was told that they marked and followed the course of the boys on their voyages; that they were moved from point to point as his youngsters advanced, and that he prayed for them as they went, night and day. The light in which he was held by those lads was shown by inscriptions in chalk on the fences. A favorite legend was ‘God bless the Kernel!’ So full did his classes at length become that the house would no longer hold them, and they had to be given up. Then it was that he attended and taught at the Ragged Schools, and it was a pleasant thing to watch the attention with which his wild scholars listened to his words.” The workhouse and the infirmary, writes another, were his constant haunts, and of pensioners he had a countless number. Many of the dying sent for him in preference to the clergyman, and he was ever ready to visit them. His purse was always empty because of his free-handedness, and he even sent some of his medals to the melting-pot in the cause of charity. When another appointment removed him from Gravesend, there was universal regret. The local newspaper paid him the following graceful and sincere tribute: “By general and continual beneficence to the poor, he has been so unwearied in well-doing that his departure will be felt by numbers to be a personal calamity. His charity was essentially charity, and had its root in deep philanthropic feeling and goodness of heart; shunning the light of publicity, but coming even as the rain in the night-time, that in the morning is noted not, but only the flowers bloom and give a greater fragrance. All will wish him well in his new sphere, and we have less hesitation in penning these lines from the fact that laudatory notice will confer but little pleasure upon him who gave with the heart and cared not for commendation.” Military glory pales before this display of missionary zeal.