a love of books that showed the presence of a cultivated taste, with a fear of God that dignified the life which it moulded and controlled.  To the last David Livingstone was proud of the class from which he sprang.  When the highest in the land were showering compliments on him, he was writing to his old friends of “my own order, the honest poor,” and trying, by schemes of colonization and otherwise, to promote their benefit.  He never had the least 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.