"I remain, yours,

"G.D. Boardman

"P.S. _Saturday Morning, August 22d._--I have just arrived at
Maulmain, and have the happiness to find my family and missionary
friends in comfortable health. Praised be the Lord for his
goodness.

"_Aug. 29th._--After much deliberation, it is thought best that I
should leave my family here, till affairs are more settled.... I
expect to embark for Tavoy to-morrow morning. May the spirit of all
grace go with me!"

This is a "plain unvarnished" account of the terrible scene through
which the missionaries were so wonderfully preserved, but to understand
more fully their imminent peril we should know, that the town, at the
time of the revolt, was almost defenceless. The English civil and
military chief absent; the officer in command on his death-bed; no
English troops in the town, and but about a hundred sepoys, who though
trained to British modes of warfare are by no means equal in skill or
valor to British troops; and the chief engineer disabled by
sickness;--the Tavoyans had well chosen the time of their attack, and
they were sufficiently numerous to have carried all their plans into
execution; but the result, like that of all conflicts between civilized
and barbarous men, shows how greatly superior a few troops, well
disciplined, are to the most numerous bodies of men, unacquainted with
the art of war.

But what could be more appalling to the stoutest heart, than the
situation of Mrs. Boardman and her helpless family! Forced to flee from
her frail hut, by bullets actually whizzing through it, and to pass
through the town amid the yells of an infuriated rabble, her path
sometimes impeded by the dead bodies of men who had fallen in the
conflict: driven from the shelter of the government house, again to fly
through the streets to the wharf-house; and there, with three or four
hundred fugitives crowded together, to await death which threatened them
in every form,--hearing over their heads the rush of cannon balls, and
seeing from burning buildings showers of sparks falling, one of which,
if it reached the magazines under their roof, was sufficient to tear the
building from its foundations and whelm them all in one common ruin,--or
if they escaped this danger, to know that hundreds of merciless
barbarians with knives and cutlasses might at any moment rush into the
building a