medical practitioner.  The idea of medical missions was at that time comparatively new.  It had been started in connection with missions to China, and it was in the prospect of going to that country that Livingstone resolved to obtain a medical education.  It would have been comparatively easy for him, in a financial sense, to get the theological training, but the medical education was a costly affair.  To a man of ordinary ideas, it would have seemed impossible to make the wages earned during the six months of summer avail not merely for his support then, but for winter too, and for lodgings, fees, and books besides.  Scotch students have often done wonders in this way, notably the late Dr. John Henderson, a medical missionary to China, who actually lived on half-a-crown a week, while attending medical classes in Edinburgh.  Livingstone followed the same self-denying course.  If we had a note of his house-keeping in his Glasgow lodging, we should wonder less at his ability to live on the fare to which he was often reduced in Africa.  But the importance of the medical qualification had taken a firm hold of his mind, and he persevered in spite of difficulties.  Though it was never his lot to exercise the healing art in China, his medical training was of the highest use in Africa, and it developed wonderfully his strong scientific turn.

[Footnote 8:  Livingstone’s minister at this time was the Rev. John Moir, of the Congregational church, Hamilton, who afterward joined the Free Church of Scotland, and is now Presbyterian minister in Wellington, New Zealand.  Mr. Moir has furnished us with some recollections of Livingstone, which reached us after the completion of this narrative.  He particularly notes that when Livingstone expressed his desire to be a missionary, it was a missionary out and out, a missionary to the heathen, not the minister of a congregation.  Mr. Moir kindly lent him some books when he went to London, all of which were conscientiously returned before he left the country.  A Greek Lexicon, with only cloth boards when lent, was returned in substantial calf.  He was ever careful, conscientious, and honorable in all his dealings, as his father had been before him.]

It was in the winter of 1836-37 that he spent his first session in Glasgow.  Furnished by a friend with a list of lodgings, Livingstone and his father set out from Blantyre one wintry day, while the snow was on the ground, and walked to Glasgow.  The lodgings were all too expensive.  All day they searched for a cheaper apartment, and at last in Rotten Row they found a room at two shillings a week.  Next evening David wrote to his friends that he had entered in the various classes, and spent twelve pounds in fees; that he felt very lonely after his father left, but would put “a stout heart to a stey brae,” and “either mak’ a spune or spoil a horn.”  At Rotten Row he found that his landlady held rather communistic views in regard to his tea and sugar; so another search had to be made, and this time he found a room in the High street, where he was very comfortable, at half-a-crown a week.