Produced by Al Haines [Frontispiece: He would lead the troops onwards with the little cane he nearly always carried.] THE CHILDREN'S HEROES SERIES THE STORY OF GENERAL GORDON BY JEANIE LANG LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK, LTD., 35 and 36 Paternoster Row, E.C. AND EDINBURGH 1906 TO ARCHIE AND BERTIE DICKSON AND ALL BOYS WHO ARE GOING TO SERVE THEIR KING ON LAND OR SEA PREFACE DEAR ARCHIE AND BERTIE, When boys read the old fairy tales, and the stories of King Arthur's Round Table, and the Knights of the Faerie Queen, they sometimes wonder sadly why the knights that they see are not like those of the olden days. Knights now are often stout old gentlemen who never rode horses or had lances in their hands, but who made much money in the City, and who have no more furious monsters near them than their own motor-cars. Only a very few knights are like what your own grandfather was. "I wish I had lived long ago," say some of the boys. "Then I might have killed dragons, and fought for my Queen, and sought for the Holy Grail. Nobody does those things now. Though I can be a soldier and fight for the King, that is a quite different thing." But if the boys think this, it is because they do not quite understand. Even now there live knights as pure as Sir Galahad, as brave and true as St. George. They may not be what the world calls "knights"; yet they are fighting against all that is not good, and true, and honest, and clean, just as bravely as the knights fought in days of old. And it is of one of those heroes, who sought all his life to find what was holy, who fought all his life against evil, and who died serving his God, his country, and his Queen, that I want to tell you now. Your friend, JEANIE LANG. CONTENTS Chapter I. "Charlie Gordon" II. Gordon's First Battles III. "Chinese Gordon" IV. "The Kernel" V. Gordon and the Slavers VI. Khartoum ILLUSTRATIONS He would lead the troops onwards with the little cane he nearly always carried . . . . . . . . . _Frontispiece_ The Corporal was butted downstairs The shell struck the ground five yards in front of him With his own hands he dragged him from the ranks Gordon appeared with soap, towels, a brush, a sponge, and a fresh suit of clothes In the Soudan buying two children for a basketful of dhoora There rode into their camp Gordon Pasha Looking for the help that never came THE STORY OF GENERAL GORDON CHAPTER I "CHARLIE GORDON" Sixty years ago, at Woolwich, the town on the Thames where the gunners of our army are trained, there lived a mischievous, curly-haired, blue-eyed boy, whose name was Charlie Gordon.