They reached Karennee, after a rough journey over the mountains and through the jungles, and proceeded at once to put up for themselves a house, and establish the mission according to their ideas. It is difficult for any one not knowing the country to conceive how hard their lot would be. Their sufferings were extreme. Hard work and exposure, together with poor food, and only the shelter of a bamboo house, that afforded no proper protection from the pitiless rains, and damp, cold blasts, soon broke down their health. Fever, the great bane of tropical malarious regions, soon found them out. Hans Polvsen died before the rains were over, and Jansen was brought into Toungoo by the American Baptist missionaries, more dead than alive, and kindly nursed and brought round. A new party from Denmark now reached Toungoo, consisting of Knudsen, his wife, and Miss Jansen, the sister of Hans, and the four set out for Karennee. Here the former experiences were renewed; for the party had not yet learnt wisdom, even by such terrible sufferings. Soon they were all very ill. Miss Jansen died: after that a babe, born to the Knudsens after reaching Karennee, was also taken. The stricken father had to get up from his sick-bed to make the coffins. They could get no meat, no bread, no milk, none of the ordinary comforts of civilised life, nothing but an inferior kind of rice, which they could not eat when sick, and which no European could thrive and work upon, even in health. Jansen was warned by an English doctor passing through the place with troops, that he must get away from Burma, or he would soon die. He went to Toungoo again, recovered a little, and, against the earnest advice of the doctor there, who warned him that he went at the peril of his life, he determined to start on a third journey for their chosen mission field. But he never again entered Karennee. On reaching the foot of the great mountain range, he seated himself beneath the shade of a beautiful arching clump of bamboos, and there breathed out his devoted life. It is characteristic of the popular, but false ideal of the missionary life entertained by many people at home, that, as my informant put it,—for by that time his eyes were opened to see the matter in its true light,—“They were inclined to make more of the ‘heroism’ of that unwise act of returning, and _dying on the way_, than they would if he had fulfilled a long career of useful service.”