She, too, had a great store of family traditions, and, like the mother of Sir Walter Scott, she retained the power of telling them with the utmost accuracy to a very old age.  In one of Livingstone’s private journals, written in 1864, during his second visit home, he gives at full length one of his mother’s stories, which some future Macaulay may find useful as an illustration of the social condition of Scotland in the early part of the eighteenth century: 

“Mother told me stories of her youth:  they seem to come back to her in her eighty-second year very vividly.  Her grandfather, Gavin Hunter, could write, while most common people were ignorant of the art.  A poor woman got him to write a petition to the minister of Shotts parish to augment her monthly allowance of sixpence, as she could not live on it.  He was taken to Hamilton jail for this, and having a wife and three children at home, who without him would certainly starve, he thought of David’s feigning madness before the Philistines, and beslabbered his beard with saliva.  All who were found guilty were sent to the army in America, or the plantations.  A sergeant had compassion on him, and said, ’Tell me, gudeman, if you are really out of your mind.  I’ll befriend you.’  He confessed that he only feigned insanity, because he had a wife and three bairns at home who would starve if he were sent to the army.  ‘Dinna say onything mair to ony body,’ said the kind-hearted sergeant.  He then said to the commanding officer, ’They have given us a man clean out of his mind:  I can do nothing with the like o’ him,’ The officer went to him and gave him three shillings, saying, ‘Tak’ that, gudeman, and gang awa’ hame to your wife and weans, ‘Ay,’ said mother, ’mony a prayer went up for that sergeant, for my grandfather was an unco godly man.  He had never had so much money in his life before, for his wages were only threepence a day.”

Mrs. Livingstone, to whom David had always been a most dutiful son, died on the 18th June, 1865, after a lingering illness which had confined her to bed for several years.  A telegram received by him at Oxford announced her death; that telegram had been stowed away in one of his traveling cases, for a year after (19th June, 1866), in his Last Journals, he wrote this entry:  “I lighted on a telegram to-day: 

     ’Your mother died at noon on the 18th June.

This was in 1865; it affected me not a little[3].”

[Footnote 3:  Last Journals vol. i. p. 55]

The home in which David Livingstone grew up was bright and happy, and presented a remarkable example of all the domestic virtues.  It was ruled by an industry that never lost an hour of the six days, and that welcomed and honored the day of rest; a thrift that made the most of everything, though it never got far beyond the bare necessaries of life; a self-restraint that admitted no stimulant within the door, and that faced bravely and steadily all the burdens of life;