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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1891 Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XVI. OUR view of the present condition of Christian missions in Bassein will not be complete, unless we bring the history of the mission to the Pwos, as well as that to the Burmans, down from 1849-1854, to the present time. Mr. Van Meter and his excellent wife, Mrs. Helen L. H. Van Meter, were most laborious and devoted missionaries, and both sacrificed their lives in the work among the Pwo Karens. They had been in the field since 1849 (except a two and a half year's visit to America in 18571860, to recruit their failing health), and they had been the first and only missionaries to that tribe till 1868, when Miss S. J. Higby joined them. Mr. Van Meter's twentyone years of service with the Pwos, though in many respects interesting, had been attended with many trials. They were much less numerous in Central and Southern Bassein than the Sgaus, though they greatly exceeded them in numbers in the northern and eastern portions of the district. As a whole, they were about equal in numbers to the Sgaus, and in all Burma the two tribes had perhaps a population of from eighty thousand to one hundred thousand. But they were different in many particulars. Of somewhat stouter build, and more fickle and unstable temper, they had not proved as susceptible to gospel truth, or as willing to abandon their worship of the nats, or demons, as the Sgaus. Their language was so different, that the Pwo could not read the Sgau, nor the latter speak or read the former. In the Tenasserim, and later in Moulmein and Rangoon, the Pwo language had been reduced to writing, and tracts, primers, and the New Testament translated and printed in it; and within the last decade, Rev. Dr. Bray ton, now of Rangoon, had completed and printed a translation of the whole Scriptures. In Bassein...