ether to go or to stay. Some of the
officials tried to persuade Mr. Judson to stay, declaring that he would
become a great man, but he could not refuse the freedom offered him after
such cruel sufferings, and he was wont to declare that the joy of finding
himself floating down the Irrawaddy in a boat with his wife and baby,
made up for their twenty-one months of peril and misery.

They were received with courtesy, and indeed with gratitude, respect, and
veneration at the English camp. The Englishmen who had been in captivity
bore witness to the kindness with which Mrs. Judson had relieved their
wants, as well as those of her husband: how she had brought them food,
mended their clothes, obtained new ones, and, as they believed, by her
arguments and appeals to the ignorant and barbarous Government, had not
only saved their lives, but convinced the authorities of the necessity of
accepting the British terms of peace.

These terms included the cession of a large portion of the Burmese
territory; and this it was that decided the missionaries to leave Ava;
for the state of exasperation and intolerance into which this brought the
Court, made it vain to think of continuing to give instruction where they
would be regarded with enmity and suspicion. Meantime, the officers in
the English camp, who had not seen a lady for nearly two years, could not
make enough of the graceful, gentle woman, so pale and fragile, yet such
a dauntless heroine, and always ready to exert herself beyond her
strength for every sufferer who came in her way.

There was a curious scene at a dinner given to the Burmese commissioners,
in a magnificent tent, with all the military pomp the camp could furnish.
When Sir Archibald appeared with Mrs. Judson on his arm, and seated her
by his side, there was such a look of discomfiture on the faces of the
guests, that he asked her if they were not old acquaintance who had
treated her ill. "That fellow with the pointed beard," he said, "seems
taken with an ague fit." Then Mrs. Judson told how, when her husband lay
in a burning fever with the five pairs of fetters, she had walked several
miles with a petition to this man, had been kept waiting till the
noontide sun was at its height, and not only was she refused, but as she
departed her silk umbrella was torn out of her hand by his greediness;
and when she begged at least to let her have a paper one to go home with,
the officer only laughed at her, and told her t