That her duties were arduous, her letters fully prove.  In one of them she says, “Every moment of my time is occupied from sunrise till ten in the evening.  It is late-bed time, and I am surrounded by five Karen women, three of whom arrived this afternoon from the jungle, after being separated from us nearly five months by the heavy rains.  The Karens are beginning to come to us in companies; and with them, and our scholars in the town, and the care of my darling boy, you will scarce think I have much leisure for letter-writing.”

Thus she toiled on, cheered by the consciousness that she was in the path of duty:  that her husband if permitted from his home in heaven to watch over the spot he most loved on earth, would smile approvingly on her labors; and encouraged by the affection of many of the disciples, and the interest awakened among some new inquirers.

But it cannot be doubted that her trials were at least equal to her encouragements.  Long before, Mr. Boardman had written, “the thoughts of this people,” the Burmans, “run in channels entirely different from ours.  Their whole system has a tendency to cramp their intellectual powers;—­professedly divine in its origin, it demands credence without evidence; it spurns improvement, disdains the suggestions of experience, and flatly denies the testimony of the external senses.  What a man sees with his own eyes he is not to believe, because his Scriptures teach otherwise....  There is no fellowship of thought between them and us on any subject.  Everything appears to them in a different light, they attribute everything to a different cause, seek a remedy of evils from a different quarter, and entertain, in fine, a set of thoughts and imaginations totally different from ours.”  The Karens, it is true, had fewer prejudices to be eradicated, and more easily sympathized with the missionaries than the haughty, self-sufficient Burmans; but then their very docility made them liable to another danger, that of holding their new faith lightly, and parting with it easily.  All these difficulties sometimes so pressed upon Mrs. Boardman, that she was ready to say, “It requires the patience of a Job and the wisdom of a Solomon to get on with this people; much as I love them, and good as I think they are.”  She then spoke of the converts; in whom was implanted that grace which, so far as it operates on the heart, makes all, in a sense, one in Christ Jesus; how then must she have been tried with those who would not repent and embrace the only principles that could give her the least fellowship or communion with them?

Jan. 19, 1832.—­Mrs. Boardman writes of herself and her fellow-missionaries, Mr. and Mrs. Mason, “We meet with much encouragement in our schools, and our number of day-scholars is now about eighty.  These, with the boarding schools, two village schools, and about fifty persons who learn during the rainy season in the Karen jungle, make upwards of one hundred and seventy under our instruction.  The scholars in the jungle cannot of course visit us often but a great many have come to be examined in their lessons, and we are surprised and delighted at the progress they have made.”