the last of these courses, she was urged by her natural
disposition, which was singularly modest and retiring, her feeble
health, the enervating influence of the climate, and above all by the
strong tendency to self-indulgence which always accompanies a
heart-rending sorrow. "But oh," she says in a letter to a friend, "these
poor, inquiring and Christian Karens, and the school-boys, and the
Burmese Christians" ... and the thought of _these_ made her more than
willing to adopt the second course; for she says, "My beloved husband
wore out his life in this glorious cause; and that remembrance makes me
more than ever attached to the work and the people for whose salvation
he labored till death."

During her husband's life-time. Mrs. Boardman had of course little to
perform of what could properly be called missionary labor; even her
teaching in the schools was very often interrupted by sickness, and the
schools themselves were often broken up by untoward events which the
Missionaries could not control. Now, however, new circumstances called
her to new and untried duties. Yet there was no sudden or violent change
in her mode of life. The honored lips that had instructed, and guided,
and comforted the ignorant natives, were sealed in death; yet still
those natives continued to turn their eyes and their steps to the loved
residence of their teacher whenever they found themselves oppressed
with difficulty or distress and could the widow of that venerated
teacher refuse to those poor disciples any guidance or consolation it
was in her power to bestow? No; quietly and meekly she instructed the
ignorant, consoled the afflicted, led inquirers to her Saviour, and
warned the impenitent to flee to him; and if insensibly she thus came to
fill a place from which her nature would instinctively have shrunk,
there was still about her such a modest and womanly grace, combined with
such a serious and dignified purpose of soul, that the most fastidious
could have found nothing to censure, while lovers of the cause she had
espoused, found everything to commend. "I rejoice," writes a friend in
this country to her, on hearing of her self-sacrificing labors, "that
your husband's mantle has fallen upon you ... and that more than ever
before, it is in your heart to benefit the heathen."

That her duties were arduous, her letters fully prove. In one of them
she says, "Every moment of my time is occupied _from sunrise till ten in
the evening_. It is