hankering for any title or distinction that would have seemed to lift him out of his own class; and it was with perfect sincerity that on the tombstone which he placed over the resting-place of his parents in the cemetery of Hamilton, he expressed his feelings in these words, deliberately refusing to change the "and" of the last line into "but":

TO SHOW THE RESTING-PLACE OF

NEIL LIVINGSTONE,
AND AGNES HUNTER, HIS WIFE,

AND TO EXPEESS THE THANKFULNESS TO GOD
OF THEIR CHILDREN,

JOHN, DAVID, JANET, CHARLES, AND AGNES,

FOR POOR AND PIOUS PARENTS.

David Livingstone's birthday was the 19th March, 1813. Of his early boyhood there is little to say, except that he was a favorite at home. The children's games were merrier when he was among them, and the fireside brighter. He contributed constantly to the happiness of the family. Anything of interest that happened to him he was always ready to tell them. The habit was kept up in after-years. When he went to study in Glasgow, returning on the Saturday evenings, he would take his place by the fireside and tell them all that had occurred during the week, thus sharing his life with them. His sisters still remember how they longed for these Saturday evenings. At the village school he received his early education. He seems from his earliest childhood to have been of a calm, self-reliant nature. It was his father's habit to lock the door at dusk, by which time all the children were expected to be in the house. One evening David had infringed this rule, and when he reached the door it was barred. He made no cry nor disturbance, but having procured a piece of bread, sat down contentedly to pass the night on the doorstep. There, on looking out, his mother found him. It was an early application of the rule which did him such service in later days, to make the best of the least pleasant situations. But no one could yet have thought how the rule was to be afterward applied. Looking back to this period, Livingstone might have said, in the words of the old Scotch ballad:

"O little knew my mother,
    The day she cradled me,
The lands that I should wander o'er,
    The death that I should dee."

At the age of nine he got a New Testament from his Sunday-school teacher for repeating the 119th Psalm on two successive evenings with only five errors, a proof that perseverance was bred in his very bone.

His parents were poor, and at the age of ten he was put to work in the factory as a piecer, that his earnings might aid his mother in the struggle with the wolf which had followed the family from the island that bore its name. After serving a number of years as a piecer, he was promoted to be a spinner. Greatly to his mother's delight, the first half crown he ever earned was laid by him in her lap. Livingstone has told us that with a part of his first week's wages he purchased Ruddiman's Rudiments of Latin, and pursued the study of that language with unabated ardor for many years afterward at an evening class which had been opened between the hours of eight and ten. "The dictionary part of my labors was followed up till twelve o'clock, or later, if my mother did not interfere by jumping up and snatching the books out of my hands. I had to be back in the factory by six in the morning, and continue my work, with intervals for breakfast and dinner, till eight o'clock at night. I read in this way many of the classical authors, and knew Virgil and Horace better at sixteen than I do now [4]."

[4] Missionary Travels, p. 8.

In his reading, he tells us that he devoured all the books that came into his hands but novels, and that his plan was to place the book on a portion of the spinning-jenny, so that he could catch sentence after sentence as he passed at his work. The labor of attending to the wheels was great, for the improvements in spinning machinery that have made it self-acting had not then been introduced. The utmost interval that Livingstone could have for reading at one time was less than a minute.

The thirst for reading so early shown was greatly stimulated by his father's example. Neil Livingstone, while fond of the old Scottish theology, was deeply interested in the enterprise of the nineteenth century, or, as he called it, "the progress of the world," and endeavored to interest his family in it too. Any books of travel, and especially of missionary enterprise, that he could lay his hands on, he eagerly read. Some publications of the Tract Society, called the Weekly Visitor, the Child's Companion and Teacher's Offering, were taken in, and were much enjoyed by his son David, especially the papers of "Old Humphrey." Novels were not admitted into the house, in accordance with the feeling prevalent in religious circles. Neil Livingstone had also a fear of books of science, deeming them unfriendly to Christianity; his son instinctively repudiated that feeling, though it was some time before the works of Thomas Dick, of Broughty-Ferry, enabled him to see clearly, what to him was of vital significance, that religion and science were not necessarily hostile, but rather friendly to each other.

The many-sidedness of his character showed itself early; for not content with reading, he used to scour the country, accompanied by his brothers, in search of botanical, geological, and zoological specimens. Culpepper's Herbal was a favorite book, and it set him to look in every direction for as many of the plants described in it as the countryside could supply. A story has been circulated that on these occasions he did not always confine his researches in zoology to fossil animals. That Livingstone was a poacher in the grosser sense of the term seems hardly credible, though with the Radical opinions which he held at the time it may readily be believed that he had no respect for the sanctity of game. If a salmon came in his way while he was fishing for trout, he made no scruple of bagging it. The bag on such occasions was not always made for the purpose, for there is a story that once when he had captured a fish in the "salmon pool," and was not prepared to transport such a prize, he deposited it in the leg of his brother Charles's trousers, creating no little sympathy for the boy as he passed through the village with his sadly swollen leg!

It was about his twentieth year that the great spiritual change took place which determined the course of Livingstone's future life. But before this time he had earnest thoughts on religion. "Great pains," he says in his first book, "had been taken by my parents to instill the doctrines of Christianity into my mind, and I had no difficulty in understanding the theory of a free salvation by the atonement of our Saviour; but it was only about this time that I began to feel the necessity and value of a personal application of the provisions of that atonement to my own case [5]." Some light is thrown on this brief account in a paper submitted by him to the Directors of the London Missionary Society in 1838, in answer to a schedule of queries sent down by them when he offered himself as a missionary for their service. He says that about his twelfth year he began to reflect on his state as a sinner, and became anxious to realize the state of mind that flows from the reception of the truth into the heart. He was deterred, however, from embracing the free offer of mercy in the gospel, by a sense of unworthiness to receive so great a blessing, till a