CHAPTER VI

Summary

Towards the latter part of the year 1845 the health of his wife began to give way, and so rapidly did it decline that there seemed no other remedy than an immediate removal to a better clime. In this state of anxiety he embarked coastwise for Madras, purposing to send his wife and children to England, and return to his own duties at Masulipatam; but on reaching Madras, the advice of his friends and the medical attendants induced him to accompany her, for indeed her illness had become so alarming, as to render her recovery, even in a better climate, a very uncertain event. She was conveyed on board the barque “Diana” on the evening of the 30th of October, 1845, and the vessel was to have sailed the next morning; but during the night her complaint, hastened probably by the fatigue of removal, came to a crisis, and she died the following morning, owing to the bursting of an abscess in the liver, which produced suffocation.

She was truly in earnest about the work in which she had engaged, and though it pleased God thus early to remove her from the scene of earthly labour, the evidences she had given of devotion to the cause of Christ, and of her own spiritual union with Him, furnished the strongest grounds for consolation to her surviving friends.