592 LIFE OF DA VID LIVINGSTONE, LL.D. 



in the shadow of the Royal Abbey ; and yet Africa, which holds the dust of 

 his beloved wife, possesses his heart I That the negroes buried at Ilala ; and 

 it is quiet enough, l after life's fitful fever,' in the gloom of the ' still, still 

 wood,' near the great lake. Africa had his heart always ; we scarcely pos- 

 sessed the right to take that from her. Subjoined is a specimen of the 

 traveller's tender quickness of gratitude, even to an outcast and in the bad 

 Many em a country : — 



" ' A woman (he says) with leprous hands gave me her hut — a nice clean 

 one — and very heavy rain came on. Of her own accord she prepared dump- 

 lings of green maize, pounded and boiled, which are sweet, for she said that 

 she saw I was hungry. It was excessive weakness from purging she mistook, 

 but seeing that I did not eat for fear of the leprosy, she kindly pressed me : 

 " Eat, you are weak from hunger ; this will strengthen you." I put it out of 

 her sight, and blessed her motherly heart.' 



" Further on, when Livingstone has suffered for eighty days from ulcers 

 in the foot, his medicines gone, his force failing, and, one would think, even 

 his great heart breaking — as the hearts of the slaves do when they see the 

 last of their native hills — we have him extracting humorous solace from a 

 review. He copies a favourable notice of his last book from the ' British 

 Quarterly Review,' and labels it ' A drop of comfort.' It is a little bit of 

 well-deserved praise which the traveller has found quoted on the fly-leaf of 

 one of his travelling-volumes, and he turns it gallantly into a moral tonic. 

 The reviewer is happy, indeed, whose pen can thus boast that it has reinforced 

 David Livingstone in one of his sorest straits. Yet what straits are sore for 

 a man whose one thought and hope are thus expressed in the beginning of 

 his Diary for 1871 : '0 Father ! help me to finish this work to Thy honour' ? 

 Such natures may suffer, but they cannot despair, and cannot be defeated. 



"With one citation more we close our present notice. It describes, from 

 Livingstone's own hand, that thrilling and happy hour of glad surprise when, 

 at the end of all his resources, the traveller was lying at Ujiji in a state ol 

 illness, poverty, and depression, which probably would soon have put an 

 earlier end to his journeying than that fixed by natural decay. It was the 

 24th October, 1871, and, while Livingstone was as near to despair as such a 

 man could go, Mr. Stanley was already within a morning's march of his hut. 

 The Doctor writes : — 



" 'My property has been sold to Shereef's friends at merely nominal 

 prices. Syed bin Majid, a good man, proposed that they should be returned, 

 and the ivory be taken from Shereef ; but they would not restore stolen pro- 

 perty, though they knew it to be stolen. Christians would have acted dif- 

 ferently, even those of the lowest classes. I felt in my destitution as if I 

 were the man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among 

 thieves ; but I could not hope for priest, Levite, or good Samaritan to come 



