They lowered him to his ocean-grave without a prayer; for his freed spirit had soared above the reach of earthly intercession, and to the foreigners who stood around, it would have been a senseless form.  And there they left him in his unquiet sepulchre; but it matters little, for we know that while the unconscious clay is “drifting on the shifting currents of the restless main,” nothing can disturb the hallowed rest of the immortal spirit.  Neither could he have a more fitting monument, than the blue waves which visit every coast; for his warm sympathies went forth to the ends of the earth, and included the whole family of man.  It is all as God would have it, and our duty is but to bend meekly to his will, and wait, in faith and patience, till we also shall be summoned home.

CHAPTER II.

CONCLUSION.

    * * * * “Last scene of all
    To close this sad, eventful history.”

Scarcely four years ago,—­in sickness and loneliness, and sad suspense,—­in her Burman home, from which had departed (alas, forever!) its light and head—­Emily C. Judson penned the foregoing beautiful letter.  Read again its closing sentence,[11] and note how short a time she has “waited in faith and patience;” how soon she has been “summoned home.”  For her, it would be wrong for us to mourn.  She has rejoined that circle, which she loved so well on earth, in a land where

    “Sickness and sorrow, pain and death
      Are felt and feared no more.”

But to her aged parents—­to the little flock to whom she was as the tenderest mother—­to the literary world, which enjoyed the ripe fruits of her genius—­to the Christian world, of which she was a shining ornament and glory, her loss is irreparable.  In her own inimitable words, we may exclaim: 

    “Weep, ye bereaved! a dearer head
      Ne’er left the pillowing breast;
    The good, the pure, the lovely fled,
    When mingling with the shadowy dead
      She meekly went to rest.

    “Angels, rejoice! another string
      Has caught the strains above,
    Rejoice, rejoice! a new-fledged wing
    Around the throne is hovering,
      In sweet, glad, wondering love.”

But though one of the sweet fountains that well up here and there in our desert world, and surround themselves with greenness, and beauty, and life, has been exhaled to heaven, still it is refreshing to know that its streams, which made glad so many hearts, have not perished, for they were of “living water, springing up” into immortality.  The writer is lost to us; her writings remain.  By them “she being dead yet speaketh,” and through them, whensoever we will, she may talk with us.

Mrs. Judson’s final malady was consumption, but for several years her health had been feeble.  One who saw her just before she left America says:  “Looking upon her, we saw at once that it was a spirit which had already outworn its frame—­a slight, pale, delicate, and transparent creature, every thought and feeling shining through, and every word and movement tremulous with fragility. * * * We said farewell with no thought that she would ever return.”