leave, as did also other friends among the military. By that time nearly all the ladies and children had left. The place looked very desolate, and I began to question whether I was right in resisting advice any longer. My Moonshee told me candidly he thought I “ought to go.” Being a Mohammedan, and having a pecuniary loss in the suspension of my lessons in the language, his warning had much weight with me. I had then to settle the question, raised by the commanding officer, whether our resistance to going, under those circumstances, was not more a tempting of, rather than a trusting in, Providence? I hated to leave my post, even for a limited time. Yet to remain looked, as he argued, should an insurrection occur, and I become a victim, like throwing away my life without being able to do any good by it; and the Missionary Board would probably have blamed me for not taking advice, and acting on the prudence which “foreseeth the evil,” and takes refuge “till the indignation is overpast.” Still, had I been alone, or could I have induced Mrs. B. to take the children and go without me, (a proposition she met by declaring she would never consent to it, but would cling to her husband and cheerfully share his fate, whatever it might be,) I would have remained. But when to all the preceding reasons, the reflection was added that Mrs. B.'s situation required that, if moved at all, it must be then, as a little later flight would be impossible, and she and the children and myself must remain and take whatever doom the mutineers chose to give us, I consulted Joel, and asked his advice as to what had better be done. He thought it safest that we should go, say for three or four weeks, to Nynee Tal, and, if all remained quiet, we could then return. Meanwhile he promised to sustain our humble service, and keep every thing in order. How little he or I then imagined that he himself, or any native Christian, would be in peril, or that before we again stood together on that spot, events would transpire around him that would fill the civilized world with horror!
I, therefore, arranged to suspend my English service, (indeed most of those who attended were already gone,) hoping soon to
