An English gentleman who, many years after, was his fellow-prisoner in Ava, writes as follows: “I will give the story as I heard it from the actor’s own mouth, and as nearly as I can recollect them, in his words: ‘In my early days of wildness I joined a band of strolling players. We lived a reckless, vagabond life, finding lodgings where we could, and bilking the landlord where we found opportunity—in other words, running up a score, and then decamping without paying the reckoning. Before leaving America, when the enormity of this vicious course rested with a depressing weight on my mind, I made a second tour over the same ground, carefully making amends to all whom I had injured.’” This, though rather a coarse statement of the case, seems to the author in the main truthful. The author does not wish to gloze over this episode in Mr. Judson’s life. Such a wrong course, succeeded by thorough repentance and reparation, he thinks quite characteristic of Mr. Judson’s positive nature. CHAPTER II. CONSECRATION TO MISSIONARY LIFE. 1809-1812. In September, 1809, young Judson, at the age of twenty-one, began to ponder seriously the subject of Foreign Missions. He had just finished his first year of study at Andover; another year of the theological course remained. At this time there fell into his hands a sermon preached in the parish church of Bristol, England, by Dr. Claudius Buchanan, who had for many years been a chaplain to the British East India Company. The sermon was entitled, “The Star in the East,” and had for its text Matt. ii. 2: “For we have seen His Star in the East, and are come to worship Him.” The leading thought of the sermon was the Evidences of the Divine Power of the Christian Religion in the East. Dr. Buchanan described the progress of the Gospel in India, and especially the labors of the venerable German missionary, Schwartz. This sermon fell like a spark into the tinder of Judson’s soul. In a letter written many years afterward, he says: