8 DA VID LIVINGSTONE. [chap. i. 



exemplifying their value in their own home. She was a 

 delicate little woman, with a wonderful flow of good 

 spirits, and remarkable for the beauty of her eyes, to 

 which those of her son David bore a strong resemblance. 

 She was most careful of household duties and attentive 

 to her children. Her love had no crust to penetrate, 

 but came beaming out freely like the light of the sun. 

 Her son loved her, and in many ways followed her. 

 It was the genial, gentle influences that had moved him 

 under his mother's training that enabled him to move 

 the savages of Africa. 



She too had a great store of family traditions, and, like 

 the mother of Sir Walter Scott, she retained the power 

 of telling them with the utmost accuracy to a very old 

 age. In one of Livingstone's private journals, written 

 in 1864, during his second visit home, he gives at full 

 length one of his mother's stories, which some future 

 Macaulay may find useful as an illustration of the social 

 condition of Scotland in the early part of the eighteenth 

 century : — 



"Mother told me stories of her youth : they seem to come back to her 

 in her eighty-second year very vividly. Her grandfather, Gavin Hunter, 

 could write, while most common people were ignorant of the art. A 

 poor woman got him to write a petition to the minister of Shotts 

 parish to augment her monthly allowance of sixpence, as she could not 

 live on it. He was taken to Hamilton jail for this, and having a wife 

 and three children at home, who without him would certainly starve, 

 he thought of David's feigning madness before the Philistines, and be- 

 slabbered his beard with saliva. All who were found guilty were 

 sent to the army in America; or the plantations. A serjeant had 

 compassion on him and said, ' Tell me, gudeman, if you are really out 

 of your mind. I '11 befriend you.' He confessed that he only feigned 

 insanity, because he had a wife and three bairns at home who would 

 starve if he were sent to the army. ' Dinna say onything mair to 

 ony body,' said the kind-hearted serjeant. He then said to the com- 

 manding officer, ' They have given us a man clean out of his mind : I 

 can do nothing with the like o' him.' The officer went to him and 

 gave him three shillings, saying, ' Tak' that, gudeman, and gang awa' 

 hame to your wife and weans.' ' Ay/ said mother, ' mony a prayer 

 went up for that serjeant, for my grandfather was an unco godly man. 



