A CHARMED LIFE. 727 



of the little comforts and discomforts of travel. If his leaders 

 had occasion to chastise a mischievous boy, it entered the journal; 

 if a man unluckily was taxed with storage for an insect in the 

 aqueous chamber of his eye, it interested him. We have not 

 space for these things, and the reader would be impatient of 

 being kept back from the graver matters before us should we 

 require him to be so much interested in sixty or seventy men 

 of whom he knows nothing. The capacity of observing these 

 trivialties was a distinguishing trait, however, in the character 

 of Dr. Livingstone. It was the same element of character 

 which constituted him infinitely the superior of ordinary travel- 

 lers; that made his observations so reliable in matters of science. 

 The days were to Dr. Livingstone days of toil. He was no 

 longer young, and the wildness of Africa was no longer novel 

 to him. Those wonderful forests and charming hills which 

 engaged the 5ye of Mr. Stanley like the shifting scenes of a 

 grand panorama, were all familiar scenes to the man who had 

 been walking up and down in the land during thirty years. 

 Even that wonderful "paradise of hunters," where the young 

 leader of the Herald expedition rejoiced in his first engagements 

 with the monsters of the wilderness, possessed nothing new or 

 awe-inspiring. It is almost incredible that a man should be- 

 come so thoroughly indifferent to the proximity of the most 

 ferocious and dangerous wild beasts as was Dr. Livingstone. 

 We remember the views which he expressed in earlier years 

 about the lion. He never changed them ; and he seems to have 

 become so accustomed to, not the lion only, but all his forest 

 rivals, that he could hardly give them mention. Indeed, we 

 cannot help feeling sometimes, as his men felt and said so fre- 

 quently in substance, that he carried a "charmed life," and 

 lived in constant exposure to savage men and beasts in the 

 serenity of an almost conscious immortality. But the traveller 

 who thinks that the indifference of Livingstone to the monsters 

 that hold an unscrupulous sway in the wilds of Africa proves 

 that they may be despised with impunity is mistaken. We 

 must not forget that explorers travel generally with extensive 

 caravans — little armies. The adventurers who attempt a less 

 imposing and dismaying invasion of those wilds are, perhaps, 

 the safer interpreters of the lion's roar, the "shriek" of the ele- 



