LIVINGSTONE. 
215 
What was of much more consequence, however, was the 
excellent home influence under which he grew up. His 
parents were poor and self-respecting, typical examples 
of all that is best among the humbler families of Scot¬ 
land. They were too poor to give their family more 
than an elementary education, but that was good so far 
as it went, and quite adequate in David’s case to enable 
him to do all the rest for himself. At the age of ten 
years he left the village school for the neighbouring 
cotton-mill, but from the first he must have aimed at a 
lot somewhat higher than that of a mill-worker, as with 
MOFFAT’S MISSION-HOUSE. 
part of his first earnings he bought a copy of Ruddiman’s 
‘ Latin Rudiments,’ and by strenuous efforts he qualified 
himself at the age of twenty-three to undertake a college 
curriculum. His reading during these thirteen years of 
hard work w r as not confined to text-books ; he eagerly 
devoured books of all kinds, literary and scientific, that 
came in his way. He was, moreover, fond of rambling 
from his early years, and collected specimens in all 
departments of natural history—geology, zoology, and 
botany. In his twentieth year, he tells us, he under¬ 
went the change known in certain religious circles as 
“ conversion." Livingstone never seems to have been 
