40 LIFE OF DA VID LI VINGSTONF, LL.D. 



was no sense of pain nor feeling of terror, though quite conscious of all that 

 was happening. It was like what patients partially under the influence of 

 chloroform describe, who see all the operation, but feel not the knife. This 

 singular condition was not the result of any mental process. The shake 

 annihilated fear, and allowed no sense of horror in looking round at the beast. 

 This peculiar state is probably produced in all animals killed by the car- 

 nivora; and if so, is a merciful provision by our benevolent Creator for 

 lessening the pain of death. Turning round to relieve myself of the weight, 

 as he had one paw on the back of my head, I saw his eyes directed to Me- 

 balwe (a native schoolmaster), who was trying to shoot him at a distance of 

 ten or fifteen yards. His gun, a flint one, missed fire in both barrels ; the 

 lion immediately left me, and attacking Mebalwe, bit his thigh. Another 

 man whose hip I had cured before, after he had been tossed by a buffalo, 

 attempted to spear the lion while he was biting Mebalwe; he left Mebalwe 

 and caught this man by the shoulder, but at that moment the bullets he had 

 received took effect, and he fell down dead. . . . Besides crunching the 

 bone into splinters, he left eleven teeth wounds in my arm." The broken 

 and splintered bones were very imperfectly attended to, as Dr. Livingstone 

 had to act as his own surgeon, and the arm ever afterwards was of compara- 

 tively little service to him. 



Livingstone shrank from inquirers who were anxious to have minute 

 details as to the perils he had gone through ; not that he really made light of 

 them, but he had a horror of sensationalism, and avoided every temptation to 

 enlarge upon difficulties which were inevitable at the time of their occurrence. 

 " In connection with the above incident," says a writer in the British Quarterly 

 Review for April, 1874, " we well remember how, when on a visit to England, 

 he was eagerly questioned by a group of sympathetic friends as to what he 

 was thinking of when in the lion's grasp, and how he quietly answered, that 

 he was thinking, with a feeling of disinterested curiosity, which part of him 

 the brute would eat first." 



Lions are much more numerous, and encounters with them much more 

 frequent than Dr. Livingstone's comparatively few allusions to them would 

 lead us to expect. He never cared to take up time and space in chronicling 

 his dealing with them, or other kinds of wild animals, unless there was some- 

 thing unusual in the experience. In travelling even in the neighbourhood of 

 the colonial frontier, travellers had to dispose themselves and their oxen at 

 night so as to be least exposed to the attack of these animals ; fires being 

 frequently kindled to keep them at a distance. The traveller in these regions 

 would not be abroad many days, before himself and his cattle were put in 

 extreme peril by the visits of lions. Cattle in their terror, when his roar rever- 

 berates through the darkness, frequently break loose, and run wildly in their 

 panic right into the danger they so much dread. In the early morning and the 



