1849-52-] KOLOBENG—LAKE 'NGAML 109 



and in his letters to home, Livingstone again and again 

 acknowledges with deepest gratitude the numberless acts 

 of kindness done by Mr. Oswell to him and his family, 

 and often adds the prayer that God would reward him, 

 and of His grace give him the highest of all blessings. 

 " Though I cannot repay, I may record with gratitude 

 his kindness, so that, if spared to look upon these, my 

 private memoranda, in future years, proper emotions may 

 ascend to Him who inclined his heart to show so much 

 friendship." 



The party followed the old route, around the bed of 

 the Zouga, then crossed a piece of the driest desert they 

 had ever seen, with not an insect or a bird to break the 

 stillness. On the third day a bird chirped in a bush, 

 when the dog began to bark ! Shobo, their guide, a 

 Bushman, lost his way, and for four days they were 

 absolutely without water. In his Missionary Travels, 

 Livingstone records quietly, as was his wont, his terrible 

 anxiety about his children : — 



" The supply of water in the wagons had been wasted by one of 

 our servants, and by the afternoon only a small portion remained for 

 the children. This was a bitterly anxious night ; and next morning, 

 the less there was of water, the more thirsty the little rogues became. 

 The idea of their perishing before our eyes was terrible ; it would 

 almost have been a relief to me to have been reproached with being 

 the entire cause of the catastrophe, but not one syllable of upbraiding 

 was uttered by their mother, though the tearful eye told the agony 

 within. In the afternoon of the fifth day, to our inexpressible relief, 

 some of the men returned with a supply of that fluid of which we had 

 never before felt the true value." 



" No one," he remarks in his Journal, " knows the value of water 

 till he is deprived of it. We never need any spirits to qualify it, or 

 prevent an immense draught of it from doing us harm. I have drunk 

 water swarming with insects, thick with mud, putrid from other 

 mixtures, and no stinted draughts of it either, yet never felt any 

 inconvenience from it." 



" My opinion is," he said on another occasion, " that the most 

 severe labours and privations may be undergone without alcoholic 

 stimulus, because those who have endured the most had nothing else 

 but water, and not always enough of that." 



