Mr. Judson returned to Amherst January 24, 1827. The native Christians greeted him with the voice of lamentation, for his presence reminded them of the great loss they had sustained in the death of Mrs. Judson. His hearth was desolate. His motherless babe had been tenderly cared for by Mrs. Wade. Mr. and Mrs. Wade had arrived from Calcutta about two months before, and with them Mr. Judson made his temporary home. Two months later Mr. and Mrs. Boardman arrived, so that the missionary force was increased to five. The little native church of four members was, however, reduced by the departure of Moung Ing. This poor fisherman, who had been Mrs. Judson’s faithful companion at Ava, had, of his own accord, conceived the purpose of undertaking a missionary excursion to his late fishing-grounds, Tavoy and Mergui, towns south of Amherst, situated on the Tenasserim coast. He was henceforth to be a fisher of men.
Mr. Boardman, in speaking of his first meeting with Mr. Judson, said, “He looks as if worn out with sufferings and sorrows.” He did not, however, neglect his missionary work. He met the Burmans for public worship on Sunday, and each day at family worship new inquirers stole in and were taught the religion of Christ. He was also busily employed in revising the New Testament in several points which were not satisfactorily settled when the translation was made; for his besetting sin was, as he himself described it, “a lust for finishing.” He completed two catechisms for the use of Burman schools, the one astronomical, the other geographical, while his sorrowful heart sought comfort in commencing a translation of the Book of Psalms.
Little Maria was the solace of his studies. But she, too, was taken from him. “On April 24, 1827,” he writes, “my little daughter Maria breathed her last, aged two years and three months, and her emancipated spirit fled, I trust, to the arms of her fond mother.”
Mr. Boardman, who had only just arrived from Calcutta, constructed a coffin, and made all the preparations for the funeral. At nine o’clock the next day little Maria was placed by her mother’s side beneath the hopia-tree. “After leaving the grave,” Mr. Boardman writes, “we had a delightful conversation on the kindness and tender mercies of our heavenly Father. Brother Judson seemed carried above his grief.”
And so at the age of thirty-nine he found himself alone in the world, bereft of his wife and two children.
To Mrs. Hasseltine he wrote:
“AMHERST, _April_ 26, 1827.
“My little Maria lies by the side of her fond mother. The complaint to which she was subject several months proved incurable. She had the best medical advice; and the kind care of Mrs. Wade could not have been, in any respect, exceeded by that of her own mother. But all our efforts, and prayers, and tears could not propitiate the cruel disease; the work of death went forward, and after the usual process, excruciating to a parent’s heart, she ceased to breathe on the 24th instant, at 3 o’clock P.M., aged two years and three months. We then closed her faded eyes, and bound up her discolored lips, where the dark touch of death first appeared, and folded her little hands on her cold breast. The next morning we made her last bed in the small enclosure that surrounds her mother’s lonely grave. Together they rest in hope, under the hope-tree (_hopiá_), which stands at the head of the graves; and together, I trust, their spirits are rejoicing after a short separation of precisely six months.
“And I am left alone in the wide world. My own dear family I have buried; one in Rangoon, and two in Amherst. What remains for me but to hold myself in readiness to follow the dear departed to that blessed world,
“‘Where my best friends, my kindred dwell, Where God, my Saviour, reigns.’”
The time had now come when the little mission established at Amherst, with such doleful omens, was to be broken up. Amherst was being rapidly eclipsed by the town of Maulmain, situated on the coast about twenty-five miles farther north, at the very mouth of the Salwen. Maulmain was also a new town, the settlers building their houses right in a thick jungle. But within a year of the first settlement, while the number of houses in Amherst amounted to two hundred and thirty, and the population to twelve hundred, the population of Maulmain had rapidly swelled to twenty thousand. The reason for this growth was an unfortunate misunderstanding between the Civil Commissioner, Mr. Crawfurd, and the Commander-in-Chief, Sir Archibald Campbell.