Even before leaving America he had written to the Corresponding Secretary on this point:
“The accounts of the late revolution in Burmah are so contradictory, and the prospect of more toleration so indefinite, that no certain expectation can well be entertained. It is possible, however, that, on my arriving in Maulmain, there may be an opening for me to proceed to Ava. There is sometimes a tide in affairs which, once lost, returns not again. Have the Board sufficient confidence in me to authorize me, by an overland dispatch which shall meet me on arriving in Maulmain, to attempt a mission at Ava, without waiting for further permission, or being under the necessity of debating the matter with other missionaries, who may demur, for want of something express from the Board?
“The dictionary would not be done _so soon_, if I should go to Ava; but it would be done _much better_, by means of the aids which the capital would furnish.”
Impelled by these motives Mr. and Mrs. Judson, taking with them their two little boys, embarked at Maulmain for Rangoon on February 15, 1847.
Only two months and a half had passed since their return from America. They might have been pardoned had they remained longer in the society of their missionary associates in Maulmain. But it was not their purpose to seek their own pleasure. They willingly left the twilight of Maulmain, in order to penetrate the dense darkness of Rangoon, although, as Mr. Judson wrote, “it seemed harder for him to leave Maulmain for Rangoon than to leave Boston for Maulmain.”
After a voyage of five days they and their two children arrived in Rangoon. Mr. Judson had previously made a visit there alone, in order “to ascertain the state of things in Burmah more definitely before making an attempt to settle there.” He had on that occasion hired, for fifty rupees[67] a month, the upper part of a large brick house, which Mrs. Judson subsequently named “Bat Castle.” He describes it as—
“A place dreary indeed, and destitute of almost all outward comforts, but one which will afford an opportunity of building up the feeble church by private efforts, and of seizing the first opening for more public efforts that God in His providence may present, in answer to the prayers of His people in beloved, far-distant America.”
Before engaging the house he wrote to Mrs. Judson: “The place looks as gloomy as a prison.... I shrink at taking you and the children into such a den, and fear you would pine and die in it.” It was into this forbidding abode that Mr. Judson introduced the lady to whom he had been so recently married. He wrote:
“We have had a grand bat hunt yesterday and to-day—bagged two hundred and fifty, and calculate to make up a round thousand before we have done. We find that, in hiring the upper story of this den, we secured the lower moiety only, the upper moiety thereof being preoccupied by a thriving colony of vagabonds, who flare up through the night with a vengeance, and the sound of their wings is as the sound of many waters, yea, as the sound of your boasted Yankee Niagara; so that sleep departs from your eyes, and slumber from our eyelids. But we are reading them some lessons which we hope will be profitable to all parties concerned.”
But we are indebted to Mrs. Judson’s pen, in a letter to her younger sister, for a still more vivid portraiture of “Bat Castle”:
“BAT CASTLE (Rangoon), _March_ 15, 1847.