FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 1:  She thus describes more particularly the exercises of her mind, in an entry in her Journal a year later.

“July 6.  It is just a year this day since I entertained a hope in Christ.  About this time in the evening, when reflecting on the words of the lepers, ’If we enter into the city, then the famine is in the city and we shall die there, and if we sit still here we die also,’—­I felt that if I returned to the world, I should surely perish; if I stayed where I then was I should perish; and I could but perish if I threw myself on the mercy of Christ.  Then came light, and relief, and comfort, such as I never knew before.”]

CHAPTER II.

HER MARRIAGE, AND VOYAGE TO INDIA.

In 1810, the calm current of Miss Hasseltine’s life was disturbed by circumstances which were to change all her prospects, and color her whole future destiny.  From the quiet and seclusion of her New England home, she was called to go to the ends of the earth, on a mission of mercy to the dark browed and darker minded heathen.

It is perhaps impossible for us to realize now what was then the magnitude of such an enterprise.  Our wonderful facilities for intercourse with the most distant nations, and the consequent vast amount of travel, were entirely unknown forty years ago.  A journey of two hundred miles then involved greater perplexity and required nearly as much preparation, and was certainly attended with more fatigue than a voyage to England at the present day.  The subject of evangelizing the heathen in foreign countries had scarcely received any attention in Europe, and in this country there was not even a Missionary Society.  That a female should renounce the refinements of her enlightened and Christian home, and go thousands of miles across unknown oceans

        “to the farthest verge
    Of the green earth, to distant barbarous climes,”

to spend her life in an unhealthy climate, among a race whose language was strange to her ear, whose customs were revolting to her delicacy, and who might moreover make her a speedy victim to her zeal in their behalf,—­a thing so common now as to excite no surprise and little interest—­was then hardly deemed possible, if indeed, the idea of it entered the imagination.  To decide the question of such an undertaking as this, as well as another question affecting her individual happiness through life, was Miss Hasseltine now summoned.

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