she remain to
the last a peasant woman, with a reproachful tongue, but the early
hardships of Calcutta and the fever and dysentery of Mudnabati clouded
the last twelve years of her life with madness. Never did reproach or
complaint escape his lips regarding either her or Thomas, whose
eccentric impulses and oft-darkened spirit were due to mania also. Of
both he was the tender nurse and guardian when, many a time, the
ever-busy scholar would fain have lingered at his desk or sought the
scanty sleep which his jealous devotion to his Master's business
allowed him. The brotherhood arrangement, the common family, Ward's
influence over the boys, and Hannah Marshman's housekeeping relieved
him of much that his wife's illness had thrown upon him at Mudnabati,
so that a colleague describes him, when he was forty-three years of
age, as still looking young in spite of the few hairs on his head,
after eleven years in Lower Bengal of work such as never Englishman had
before him. But almost from the first day of his early married life he
had never known the delight of daily converse with a wife able to enter
into his scholarly pursuits, and ever to stimulate him in his heavenly
quest. When the eldest boy, Felix, had left for Burma in 1807 the
faithful sorrowing husband wrote to him:--"Your poor mother grew worse
and worse from the time you left us, and died on the 7th December about
seven o'clock in the evening. During her illness she was almost always
asleep, and I suppose during the fourteen days that she lay in a severe
fever she was not more than twenty-four hours awake. She was buried
the next day in the missionary burying-ground."

About the same time that Carey himself settled in Serampore there
arrived the Lady Rumohr. She built a house on the Hoogli bank
immediately below that of the missionaries, whose society she sought,
and by whom she was baptised. On the 9th May 1808 she became Carey's
wife; and in May 1821 she too was removed by death in her sixty-first
year, after thirteen years of unbroken happiness.

Charlotte Emilia, born in the same year as Carey in the then Danish
duchy of Schleswick, was the only child of the Chevalier de Rumohr, who
married the Countess of Alfeldt, only representative of a historic
family. Her wakefulness when a sickly girl of fifteen saved the whole
household from destruction by fire, but she herself became so disabled
that she could never walk up or down stairs. She failed to find