The tidings spreading that a new foreign physician had come to Siam, patients of every description and of all classes crowded for relief, till Dr. House was compelled to reopen the dispensary, which had long been sustained by Dr. Bradley in a floating-house moored in front of the mission premises. During the first eighteen months he had prescribed for three thousand one hundred and seventeen patients. Mr. Mattoon applied himself successfully to the study of the language, and soon entered upon the work of tract-distribution, visiting for this purpose the wats or Buddhist monasteries of the city, none being more ready to receive Christian books than the priests—or monks, rather—themselves.
In the ensuing cool season many tours were made with the brethren of other missions. Petchaburee, Ayuthia, Prabat and Petrui were visited, and everywhere they found a ready reception for the books and tracts they carried with them.
In 1848 the Rev. John Taylor Jones, D. D., returned with Mrs. S. S. Jones and Miss Harriet Morse, a missionary teacher, but Mr. Goddard of the same mission was obliged to remove to a more invigorating climate, and left for Ningpo, China. In September of this year the mission cause sustained an irreparable loss in the death of Jesse Caswell. He was a man of most earnest purpose and rare fitness for the missionary work.
