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GORDON

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GORDON

amnesty. Governor Li had to publicly acknowledge responsibility for this act, and promise to abide by Gordon's terms, before that Christian hero would again take the field. He rode always at the head of his troops, his only weapon a small cane of light wood. He was never wounded and he was believed to bear a charmed life from his magic wand. Surrendered rebel bands enlisted under his banner. He wore the yellow jacket and peacock feather and had the highest military rank in China. The rebellion was crushed, and "Chinese" Gordon went back to England with worldwide fame, but as poor in pocket as when he entered China. The 10,000 taels in silver sent him by the emperor he turned over to the British Museum. They lie there to-day, in a glass case, a pile of tarnished coins, beside his maps of the campaigns, his jacket and feather. The act was typical, for he ever treated money and honors with contempt.

The next six years he spent in routine duty at Gravesend, constructing engineering woiks on the Thames and spending his pay ^n the poor and sick. He was unman ieu, but he kept up a home where he housed many a river waif and fitted him out for the sea or a trade. In 1874 he went out to Khartum as governor of the equatorial provinces of Africa which belonged to Egypt. He opened a mail route from Cairo to Albert Nyanza (2000 miles), fortified posts and placed Egyptian garrisons in them and tried to break up the slave-trade. To this end the Khedive added the Sudan to his dominions. He made himself personally known in all that vast region. The slave-trader feared him; fanatic Moslem chiefs loved him. A son of the desert he learned to live in tents and to sleep on the backs of camels. When satisfied that the slave-trade was carried on by connivance with the government at Cairo, he resigned, rebuking the Khedive as he had Governor Li.

At fifty he was back in London, a major-general, unemployed,. Commissions were offered him in China, in Cape Colony, in the Congo State. He resigned them all when, matters having become intolerable in Central Africa, the British Government demanded that Egypt should withdraw and turn the Nile provinces and the Sudan over to England. There was but one man in England for the task of subduing and ruling that vast kingdom of sand. Gordon had been gone several years. He was not forgotten, but a new leader had appeared in the Mahdi, and England was not prepared for the task she so lightly undertook.

Gordon arrived in Khartum in February of 1884 without troops. He got 2,500 Christians down the Nile to safety before he was shut in. The siege began in March.

In April the telegraph wires were cut. In that month a relief expedition was talked of in Parliament, but nothing was done. The Nile rose to summer flood and slowly subsided. With no more than a dozen European assistants, Gordon turned river steamers into ironclads, laid mines, strung wire entanglements, executed sorties, kept up the spirits of the besieged, baffled fanatic foes for ten months. The sun burned above shrinking river and lost leagues of shimmering sand. Famine and pestilence walked in the doomed city; the grip of fanatic foes tightened. To this day the silence, the indifference, the paralysis of the government are inexplicable. For months England abandoned her best defender.

Lord Wolseley left London in September, but the delay was fatal. The Nile had gone down and boats went aground on the shallows. Khartum fell on the 26th of January, 1885; the relief arrived on the 28th. A general massacre had taken place, and Gordon's head was carried to the Mahdi's tent. No trace of his body was ever found. His diary and last letters were recovered. In one to his sister he said: "It must soon be over. I am quite happy. I have tried to do my duty." Not a word of reproach or complaint. Numerous monuments have been erected to him, but his best memorials are Gordon College in Khartum, and the Gordon Boys' Home in London. The Sudan was not conquered until 1900. (See KITCHENER). Tennyson wrote the epitaph for the tomb in Westminster Abbey. See Chinese Gordon by Archibald Forbes and Life by H. W. Gordon.

Gordon, Charles W. (Ralph Connor), was born at Indian Lands, Glengarry, Ont., in 1860, the son of a Presbyterian clergyman. He was educated at the University of Toronto, Knox College, Toronto (in theology) and at New College, Edinburgh. He was missionary in the Rocky Mountains from 1890 to 1894, visiting Great Britain in the interest of Canadian western missions and securing aid and interest, and has been minister of St. Stephen's Presbyterian Church in Winnipeg since 1894. His exceedingly popular tales of life in the wilderness are characterized by manly and fervid Christian feeling, and have had the widest circulation in Canada, Great Britain and the United States. They include Black Rock, Beyond the Marshes, Given's Canyon, The Sky Pilot, Ould Michael, The Man from Glengarry, Glengarry School Days, The Prospector and The Doctor.

Gordon, D. M., was born in Pictou, Nova Scotia, in 1845, and educated there and later at Glasgow and Berlin Universities. Ordained in 1866, he assumed charge of St. Paul's Church, Truro, Nova Scotia; removed to St. Andrews, Ottawa, in 1867;