He quiets her fears by his favorite texts for the present—­“Commit thy way to the Lord,” and “Lo, I am with you alway”; and his favorite vision of the future—­the earth full of the knowledge of the Lord.  He is somewhat cutting at the expense of so-called “missionaries to the heathen, who never march into real heathen territory, and quiet their consciences by opposing their do-nothingism to my blundering do-somethingism!” He is indignant at the charge made by some of his enemies that no good was done among the Bakwains.  They were, in many respects, a different people from before.  Any one who should be among the Makololo as he had been, would be thankful for the state of the Bakwains.  The seed would always bear fruit, but the husbandman had need of great patience, and the end was sure.

Sekeletu had not been behaving well in Livingstone’s absence.  He had been conducting marauding parties against his neighbors, which even Livingstone’s men, when they heard of it, pronounced to be “bad, bad.”  Livingstone was obliged to reprove him.  A new uniform had been sent to the chief from Loanda, with which he appeared at church, “attracting more attention than the sermon.”  He continued, however, to ’show the same friendship for Livingstone, and did all he could for him when he set out eastward.  A new escort of men was provided, above a hundred and twenty strong, with ten slaughter cattle, and three of his best riding oxen; stores of food were given, and a right to levy tribute over the tribes that were subject to Sekeletu as he passed through their borders.  If Livingstone had performed these journeys with some long-pursed society or individual at his back, his feat even then would have been wonderful; but it becomes quite amazing when we think that he went without stores, and owed everything to the influence he acquired with men like Sekeletu and the natives generally.  His heart was much touched on one occasion by the disinterested kindness of Sekeletu.  Having lost their way on a dark night in the forest, in a storm of rain and lightning, and the luggage having been carried on, they had to pass the night under a tree.  The chief’s blanket had not been carried on, and Sekeletu placed Livingstone under it, and lay down himself on the wet ground.  “If such men must perish before the white by an immutable law of heaven,” he wrote to the Geographical Society (25th January, 1856), “we must seem to be under the same sort of terrible necessity in our Caffre wars as the American Professor of Chemistry said he was under, when he dismembered the man whom he had murdered.”

Again Livingstone sets out on his weary way, untrodden by white man’s foot, to pass through unknown tribes, whose savage temper might give him his quietus at any turn of the road.  There were various routes to the sea open to him.  He chose the route along the Zambesi—­though the the most difficult, and through hostile tribes—­because it seemed the most likely to answer his desire to find a commercial