The strange feature of it is that the very night before the Edict appeared--when the I.G. had not the slightest hint of what was in store for him--he dreamed of his father's father--a thing he had not done for years. Dressed in a snuff-coloured suit, with knee-breeches and shining shoe buckles, he appeared walking down the little street of Portadown leaning heavily upon a blackthorn stick and murmuring sadly, "Nobody cares for me, nobody takes any notice of me." Nobody, indeed?
[Illustration: SIR ROBERT HART'S STABLES IN 1890.]
The very next evening at a dinner party at the French Legation some one told the I.G. of the new honour, gazetted an hour before, and how an Emperor, with a stroke of his Vermilion Pencil, had deprived the ghost of a grievance.
Equally romantic was a coincidence that happened when the I.G. was made a Baronet in 1893. The question of arms then coming up, he made all possible enquiries concerning those which his family had a right to use. Without doubt the Harts did bear arms in the days of William of Orange, when they were granted to the famous Dutchman Captain van Hardt who so distinguished himself at the Battle of the Boyne. But after his death the family grew poor; the arms fell into disuse and were forgotten so completely that one descendant thought they might have been a hart rampant, while another declared they were a sheaf of burning wheat.
Robert Hart was not the man to grope long in a fog of mystery. He decided the question once and for all by submitting a blazon of his own choice to the College of Heralds, and his design--three fleurs de lis and a four-leaved shamrock--was sanctioned, as it had not been previously applied for.
The search for the original arms was naturally given up then, but by the merest accident they were ultimately found. Some member of the family happening years afterwards to stroll through a very old cemetery in Dublin, curiosity or idleness led him to examine the tombstones. One in particular attracted his attention, perhaps because it was more dilapidated and tumble-down than the rest. He gently scraped the moss from the inscription and found that he had stumbled on the long-forgotten tomb of Captain van Hardt, and underneath the hero's name he found a coat-of-arms, half obliterated yet still recognizable. It showed _three fleurs de lis and a four-leaved shamrock_.