reward not often given to so young a man.

A little more than a year of hard training in war had turned Charlie
Gordon the boy into Gordon the soldier.

In May 1856 Gordon was sent to Bessarabia, to help to arrange new
frontiers for Russia, Turkey, and Roumania. In 1857 he was sent to do
the same work in Armenia.

The end of 1858 saw him on his way home to England, a seasoned soldier,
and a few months later he was made a captain.

CHAPTER III

"CHINESE GORDON"

For a year after his return from Armenia Gordon was at Chatham, as
Field-Work Instructor and Adjutant, teaching the future officers of
Engineers what he himself had learned in the trenches.

While he was there, a war that had been going on for some years between
Britain and China grew very serious.

Gordon volunteered for service, but when he reached China, in September
1860, the war was nearly at an end. "I am rather late for the
amusement, which won't vex mother," he wrote. He found, however, that
a number of Englishmen, some of them friends of his, were being kept as
prisoners in Pekin by the Chinese. The English and their allies at
once marched to Pekin, and demanded that the prisoners should be given
up.

The Chinese, scared at the sight of the armies and their big guns,
opened the gates. But in the case of many of the prisoners, help had
come too late. The Chinese had treated them most brutally, and many
had died under torture.

Nothing was left for the allied armies to do but to punish the Chinese
for their cruelty, and especially to punish the Emperor for having
allowed such vile things to go on in his own great city.

The Emperor lived in a palace so gorgeous and so beautiful that it
might have come out of the Arabian Nights. This palace the English
general gave orders to his soldiers to pillage and to destroy. Four
millions of money could not have replaced what was destroyed then. The
soldiers grew reckless as they went on, and wild for plunder.
Quantities of gold ornaments were burned for brass. The throne room,
lined with ebony, was smashed up and burned. Carved ivory and coral
screens, magnificent china, gorgeous silks, huge mirrors, and many
priceless things were burned or destroyed, as a gardener burns up heaps
of dead leaves and garden rubbish.

Treasures of every kind, and thousands and thousands of pounds' worth
of exquisite jewels were looted by common soldiers. Often the men had
no idea of the value of the th