built here round her, in order to weep over her grave.”  From some of the people he received great kindness; others were quite different.  Their character, in short, was a riddle, and would need to be studied more.  But the prevalent aspect of things was both distressing and depressing.  If he had thought of it continually, he would have become the victim of melancholy.  It was a characteristic of his large and buoyant nature, that, besides having the resource of spiritual thought, he was able to make use of another divine corrective to such a tendency, to find delightful recreation in science, and especially in natural history, and by this means turn the mind away for a time from the dark scenes of man’s depravity.

The people all seemed to recognize a Supreme Being; but it was only occasionally, in times of distress, that they paid Him homage.  They had no love for Him like that of Christians for Jesus—­only terror.  Some of them, who were true negroes, had images, simple but grotesque.  Their strongest belief was in the power of medicines acting as charms.  They fully recognized the existence of the soul after death.  Some of them believed in the metamorphosis of certain persons into alligators or hippopotamuses, or into lions.  This belief could not be shaken by any arguments—­at least on the part of man.  The negroes proper interested him greatly; they were numerous, prolific, and could not be extirpated.  He almost regretted that Mr. Moffat had translated the Bible into Sichuana.  That language might die out; but the negro might sing, “Men may come and men may go, but I go on for ever.”

The incessant attacks of fever from which Livingstone suffered in this journey, the continual rain occurring at that season of the year, the return of the affection of the throat for which he had got his uvula excised, and the difficulty of speaking to tribes using different dialects, prevented him from, holding his Sunday services as regularly as before.  Such entries in his Journal as the following are but too frequent: 

“Sunday, 19th.—­Sick all Sunday and unable to move.  Several of the people were ill too, so that I could do nothing but roll from side to side in my miserable little tent, in which, with all the shade we could give it, the thermometer stood upward of 90 deg..”

But though little able to preach, Livingstone made the most of an apparatus which in some degree compensated his lack of speech—­a magic-lantern which his friend, a former fellow-traveler, Mr. Murray, had given him.  The pictures of Abraham offering up Isaac, and other Bible scenes, enabled him to convey important truths in a way that attracted the people.  It was, he says, the only service he was ever asked to repeat.  The only uncomfortable feeling it raised was on the part of those who stood on the side where the slides were drawn out.  They were terrified lest the figures, as they passed along, should take possession of them, entering like spirits into their bodies!