1813-36.] EARLY YEARS. 9 



He had never had so much money in his life before, for his wages 

 were only threepence a day.' " 



Mrs. Livingstone, to whom David had always been a 

 most dutiful son, died on the 18th June 1865, after a 

 lingering illness which had confined her to bed for several 

 years. A telegram received by him at Oxford announced 

 her death ; that telegram had been stowed away in one 

 of his travelling cases, for a year after (19th June 1866), 

 in his Last Journals, he wrote this entry : — " I lighted on 

 a telegram to-day : — 



' Your mother died at noon on the 18th June.' 



This was in 1865 ; it affected me not a little." l 



The home in which David Livingstone grew up was 

 bright and happy, and presented a remarkable example 

 of all the domestic virtues. It was ruled by an industry 

 that never lost an hour of the six days, and that welcomed 

 and honoured the day of rest ; a thrift that made the 

 most of everything, though it never got far beyond the 

 bare necessaries of life ; a self-restraint that admitted no 

 stimulant within the door, and that faced bravely and 

 steadily all the burdens of life ; a love of books that 

 showed the presence of a cultivated taste, with a fear of 

 God that dignified the life which it moulded and con- 

 trolled. To the last David Livingstone was proud of the 

 class from which he sprang. When the highest in the 

 land were showering compliments on him, he was writing 

 to his old friends of " my own order, the honest poor," 

 and trying, by schemes of colonisation and otherwise, to 

 promote their benefit. He never had the least hankering 

 for any title or distinction that would have seemed to lift 

 him out of his own class; and it was with perfect sincerity 

 that on the tombstone which he placed over the resting- 

 place of his parents in the cemetery of Hamilton, he 



1 Last Journals, vol. i. p. 55. 



