After the departure of her husband for Amherst, she had begun her work with good heart. She built a little bamboo dwelling-house and two school-houses. In one of these she gathered ten Burman children who were placed under the instruction of faithful Moung Ing; while she herself assembled the few native converts for public worship every Sunday. At one time she writes:
“My female school will, I trust, soon be in operation. Then you shall hear from me constantly.”
And again:
“After all the impediments which have retarded the progress of our mission, after all our sufferings and afflictions, I can not but hope that God has mercy and a blessing in store for us. Let us strive to obtain it by our prayers and holy life.”
But in the midst of these sacred toils she was smitten with fever. Her constitution, undermined by the hardships and sufferings which she had endured, could not sustain the shock, and on October 24, 1826, in the 37th year of her age, she breathed her last. The hands so full of holy endeavors were destined to be suddenly folded for rest. She died apart from him to whom she had given her heart in her girlhood, whose footsteps she had faithfully followed for fourteen years, over land and sea, through trackless jungles and strange crowded cities, sharing his studies and his privations, illumining his hours of gloom with her beaming presence, and with a heroism and fidelity unparalleled in the annals of missions, soothing the sufferings of his imprisonment. He whom she had thus loved, and who, from his experience of Indian fever, might have been able to avert the fatal stroke, was far away in Ava. No missionary was with her when she died, to speak words of Christian consolation. The Burman converts like children gathered helplessly and broken-heartedly about their _white mamma_. The hands of strangers smoothed her dying pillow, and their ears received her last faint wandering utterances. Under such auspices as these her white-winged spirit took its flight to the brighter scenes of the new Jerusalem.
In a letter to the Corresponding Secretary, Rev. Dr. Bolles, Mr. Judson wrote:
“So far, therefore, as I had a view to the attainment of religious toleration in accompanying the embassy, I have entirely failed. I feel the disappointment more deeply on account of the many tedious delays which have already occurred, and which we anticipate during our return; so that, instead of four or five months, I shall be absent from home seven or eight.
“But, above all, the news of the death of my beloved wife has not only thrown a gloom over all my future prospects, but has forever embittered my recollections of the present journey, in consequence of which I have been absent from her dying bed, and prevented from affording the spiritual comfort which her lonely circumstances peculiarly required, and of contributing to avert the fatal catastrophe which has deprived me of one of the first of women, the best of wives.
“I commend myself and motherless child to your sympathy and prayers.”
But when writing to the mother of his beloved wife, he describes still more fully the sorrowful experience through which he passed:
_To Mrs. Hasseltine, of Bradford, Mass._
“AVA, _December_ 7, 1826.
“DEAR MOTHER HASSELTINE: This letter, though intended for the whole family, I address particularly to you; for it is a mother’s heart that will be most deeply interested in its melancholy details. I propose to give you, at different times, some account of my great, irreparable loss, of which you will have heard before receiving this letter.