Her husband and the Kaffirs cut away the side of the waggon with axes, and tried to draw her out, but she was too fast wedged in. She said in a calm voice, “Oh, remove the boxes,” but before this could be done she had breathed her last, apparently from suffocation, for her limbs were not crushed, and her exceeding delicacy of frame and shortness of breath probably made the weight and suffocation fatal to her. The little boy suffered no injury.
The spot was near a Norwegian mission station, where the kindest help was immediately offered to the husband. A coffin was made of plank that had been bought at Durban to be made into church doors, and when her husband had kept lonely vigil all night over her remains, Henrietta Robertson was laid in her grave, where the Norwegians hope to build their church, Mr. Robertson himself reading the service over her.
But her work has not died with her. Mr. Robertson returned to his lonely task, helped and tended by the converted man
and his wife, Usajabula and Christina, whom she had trained, and whose child had been with her in the fatal overturn. A clergyman returning from the Zanzibar Mission came to him and aided him for a while; other helpers have come out from time to time, and meantime, Miss Mackenzie exerted herself to the utmost, straining every nerve to obtain funds for the establishment of a Missionary Bishopric in Zululand, as the most fitting memorial to her brother, since it was here that, had he chosen for himself, his work would have lain. After several years of endeavour she has succeeded, and, even as these last pages are written, we hold in our hands the account of the arrival of the new Bishop at Kwamagwaza.
So it is that the work never perishes, but the very extinction of one light seems to cause the lighting of many more; and thus it is that the word is being gradually fulfilled that the Gospel shall be preached to all nations, and that “the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”
Footnotes:
[6] At first sight this seems one of the last misfortunes likely to have befallen a godly gentleman of Charlestown; but throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Algerine pirates swept the seas up to the very coasts of England, as Sir John Eliot’s biography testifies. Dr. James Yonge, of Plymouth, an ancestor only four removes from the writer, was at one time in captivity to them; and there was still probability enough of such a catastrophe for Priscilla Wakefield to introduce it in her “Juvenile Travellers,” written about 1780.
[130] Articles of dress.
[133] The Judsons always use the universal prefix Moung, which we omit, as evidently is a general title.
[137] All along in these letters, written journal fashion, it is to be observed how careful and even distrustful Mr. Judson is.