The alarm, however, acted as a tonic, and Mrs.Judson began to recover.
They reached Rangoon in safety, but Judson writes: "We had never before seen a place where European influence had not contributed to smooth and soften the rough features of uncultivated nature.

The prospect of Rangoon, as we approached, was quite disheartening.

I went on shore, just at night, to take a view of the place and the mission-house, but so dark and cheerless and unpromising did all things appear, that the evening of that day, after my return to the ship, we have marked as the most gloomy and distressing that we ever passed." The mission-house was not quite empty, though Felix Carey, who they had hoped would welcome them, was at Ava.

When Mrs.Judson, still too weak to walk, was carried ashore, she was received by his wife, who could speak Burmese, and managed the household, providing daily dinners of fowls stewed with rice or with cucumber.
It was, however, a dismal place, near the spot where public executions took place, and where the dead were burnt outside the walls.

And all around, among the beautiful vegetation and lovely forests on the banks of the broad Irrawaddy, rose the pagodas, graceful with the peculiar beauty of the far East, with gilded lacquer-work, umbrella-shaped roofs spiring upwards; huge idols with solemn contemplative faces within, and all around swarms of yellow-robed, fat, lazy lamas.
The new comers meantime applied themselves to the study of the language, after overcoming the disdain of their pundit at having to instruct a woman.