g weary months while the missionaries continued in fetters,
_i.e._ chained by the feet to a bar of bamboo, Mrs. Judson was often not
allowed to visit them for ten days at a time, and then only by walking to
the prison after dark, two miles, unattended. She could, however,
communicate with her husband by means of the provisions she sent him
daily. At first she used to write on the dough of a flat cake, which she
afterwards baked and concealed in a bowl of rice, while he answered by
writing on a tile, where the inscription disappeared when dry but was
visible when wet; but latterly they found it most convenient to write on
a roll of paper hidden in the long nose of a coffee-pot, in which tea was
sent to the prisoners.

Mrs. Judson delighted to send him little surprises, once a mince-pie,
which Moung Ing carried with the utmost pride to his imprisoned master.
Mrs. Judson found herself obliged to wear the native dress, though she
was so much taller than the Burmese women that she could be hardly taken
for one of them. It was a becoming dress; her hair was drawn into a knot
on the forehead, with a cocoa-blossom, like a white plume, drooping from
it; a saffron vest open in front to show a crimson tunic below; and a
tight skirt of rich silk, sloping down behind, made her look to
advantage, so that her husband liked to remember her as she stood at his
prison door. She never was allowed to come further.

For twenty days she was absent, and then she came with a tiny, pale,
wailing, blue-eyed baby on her breast. Poor Judson, clanking up to the
door in his chains to welcome his little daughter, commemorated his
feelings in some touching verses ending:--

"And when in future years
Thou know'st thy father's tongue,
These lines will show thee how he felt,
How o'er his babe he sung."

Every defeat by the European forces added to the perils of captives. A
favourite old general named Bundoolah had promised, when sent to command
the army against Rangoon, that he would release all the white prisoners
on his return as a conqueror; and when he was totally defeated, the wrath
of the Burmese was so great that at this time the King himself seems to
have scarcely acted at all. He was gentle, indolent and indifferent,
more intelligent than those around him, scarcely a Buddhist in belief,
and very kind-hearted: indeed Judson believed that it was his
interposition alone that prevented the lives of the captives from being
tak