Then he went over to the waiting people, waved his hand and said, "You can go; that's all."
Robert Hart was so much amused at being picked out as the likely smuggler of the party that he could scarcely restrain himself from whipping out of his pocket a card with "Inspector-General Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs" on it and presenting it to the man.
He found his father and mother settled at Ravarnet, as proud as happy to see him back again, and he dropped quite naturally into the simple home life, resumed his affectionate intimacy with a clan of sisters just as if it had never been broken off, and took the same delight in simple pleasures that he had taken as a boy. Some of his relatives wondered a little at this.
"Let me look at you," said they, peering and peeking about him for the solution of the mystery. For mystery there must be when a great man--yes, that's what he was already--should look just the same on the outside as Tom or Dick or Harry--should even enjoy a simple breakfast of fresh herring and tea.
"I am just like everybody else," he would answer to their half-quizzical inspection. "No more noses or eyes than you."
Alas! this home life, delightful though it was, could not last very long. On August 22nd, 1866, he married that daughter of old Dr. Bredon of Portadown that his aunt had prophesied he would when, at the age of ten days, he lay upon her lap. The honeymoon was spent at the romantic lakes of Killarney, and very soon afterwards the young couple were on their way out to China again.
The house in Peking had been somewhat rearranged and remodelled while the I.G. was in Europe, in anticipation of his wife's coming. Without altering the picturesqueness of the original Chinese design, it had been adapted to Western ideas of comfort. The pretty pavilions with their upturned roofs remained; the ornamental rockwork of the courtyards, the doors shaped like gourds or leaves or full moons, were left untouched. So were the odd-shaped windows, real Jack Frost designs; but instead of paper, glass was fitted into the quaint panes and the stone floors, characteristic of Chinese rooms, covered with wood--a very necessary alteration in a town which, although in the same latitude as Naples, Madrid and Constantinople, has a winter as severe as New York.