Boers who set me free to discover the fine new country.  They were determined to shut the country, and I was determined to open it.  They boasted to the Portuguese that they had expelled two missionaries, and outwitted themselves rather.  I got the gold medal, as you predicted, and the freedom of the town of Hamilton, which insures me protection from the payment of jail fees if put in prison!”

In writing his book, he sometimes worked in the house of a friend, but generally in a London or suburban lodging, often with his children about him, and all their noise; for, as in the Blantyre mill, he could abstract his attention from sounds of whatever kind, and go on calmly with his work.  Busy though he was, this must have been one of the happiest times in his life.  Some of his children still remember his walks and romps with them in the Barnet woods, near which they lived part of the time—­how he would suddenly plunge into the ferny thicket, and set them looking for him, as people looked for him afterward when he disappeared in Africa, coming out all at once at some unexpected corner of the thicket.  One of his greatest troubles was the penny post.  People used to ask him the most frivolous questions.  At first he struggled to answer them, but in a few weeks he had to give this up in despair.  The simplicity of his heart is seen in the childlike joy with which he welcomes the early products of the spring.  He writes to Mr. Maclear that, one day at Professor Owen’s, they had “seen daisies, primroses, hawthorns, and robin-redbreasts.  Does not Mrs. Maclear envy us?  It was so pleasant.”

But a better idea of his mode of life at home will be conveyed by the notes of some of the friends with whom he stayed.  For that purpose, we resume the recollections of Dr. Risdon Bennett: 

“On returning to England, after his first great journey of discovery, he and Mrs. Livingstone stayed in my house for some time, and I had frequent conversations with him on subjects connected with his African life, especially on such as related to natural history and medicine, on which he had gathered a fund of information.  His observation of malarious diseases, and the methods of treatment adopted by both the natives and Europeans, had led him to form very definite and decided views, especially in reference to the use of purgatives, preliminary to, and in conjunction with, quinine and other acknowledged febrifuge medicines.  He had, while staying with me, one of those febrile attacks to which persons who have once suffered from malarious disease are so liable, and I could not fail to remark his sensible observations thereon, and his judicious management of his sickness.  He had a great natural predilection for medical science, and always took great interest in all that related to the profession.  I endeavored to persuade him to commit to writing the results of his medical observations and experience among the natives of Africa, but