"A little faster, boys! a little faster!" Gordon would constantly say, and when he jumped ashore and hurried off to his work, he would leave behind him four very breathless men, who were proud of being the crew of the very fastest boat pulled in those waters.
The engineers under him he also trained never to lose any time,--always to do a thing not only as thoroughly and as well as possible, but as quickly as possible.
He would land at a port, and run up the steep earthworks in front of it, while his followers, many of them big, heavy men, would come puffing and panting after him.
One of his friends writes of him, "He was a severe and unsparing taskmaster, and allowed no shirking. No other officer could have got half the work out of the men that he did. He used to keep them up to the mark by exclaiming, whenever he saw them flag: 'Another five minutes gone, and this not done yet, my men! We shall never have them again.'"
The old-fashioned house, with its big old garden, which was Gordon's home during those six years, saw many strange guests during that time.
"His house," says one writer, "was school, and hospital, and almshouse in turn--was more like the abode of a missionary than of a Colonel of Engineers."
In his working hours he worked his hardest to serve his Queen and country. In the hours in which he might have rested or amused himself, he worked equally hard. And this other work was to serve the poor, the sick, the lonely, and to give a helping hand to every one of those who needed help. The boys whose work was on the river or the sea, and the "mud-larks" of Gravesend, were his special care. Many a boy who had no work and no right home, he took from the streets, washed, clothed, fed, and took into his house to stay with him as his guest. When he had found work for those boys, either as sailors or in other ways, he would give them outfits and money, and start them in life. For the boys who were being sheltered by him, and for others from outside, he began evening classes. There he taught them, and read to them, and did all that he could to make them Christian gentlemen. His "Kings" he called them, perhaps remembering the many Kings or "Wangs" who ruled in the Tae-Ping army.