Pioneers and Founders: or, Recent Workers in the Mission fieldYonge, Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary)
History
Pioneers and Founders: or, Recent Workers in the Mission field
Yonge, Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary)
Missionaries
To be nearer to these people, the Boardmans removed to Tavoy, where they
had a Burmese congregation; and Mr. Boardman made an expedition among the
Karens, who were, for the most part, by no means unwilling to listen, and
with little tradition to pre-occupy their minds, as well as intelligence
enough to receive new ideas. At one place, the people were found devoted
to an object that was thought to have magic power, and which they kept
with great veneration, wrapt up in many coverings. It proved to be an
English Common Prayer Book, printed at Oxford, which had been left behind
by a Mahometan traveller. On the whole, this has been a flourishing
mission; the Karens were delighted to have their language reduced to
writing, and the influence of their teachers began to raise them in the
scale; but all was done under the terrible drawback of climate. Mrs.
Boardman never was well from the time she landed at Moulmein, and her
beautiful flower-covered house at Tavoy was the constant haunt of
sickness, under which her elder child, Sarah, died, after showing all
that precocity that white children often do in these fatal regions. A
little boy named George had by this time been born, and shared with his
mother the dangers of the Tavoy rebellion, an insurrection stirred up by
a prince of the Burmese royal blood, in hopes of wresting the province
from the English.
One night, a Burmese lad belonging to the school close to the Boardmans'
house, was awakened by steps; and, peeping through the braided bamboo
walls of his hut, saw parties of men talking in an undertone about lost
buffaloes. Some went into the town, others gathered about the gate, and,
when their numbers began to thicken, a cloud of smoke was seen in the
morning dawn, and yells from a thousand voices proclaimed, "Tavoy has
risen!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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